


Because Heros Are Real

by fitz_mack



Series: Nothing to Be Worried About Because Heros Are Real [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. References, Attempted Murder, BAMF Darcy Lewis, Canon-Typical Violence, Darcy Lewis Is a Good Bro, Darcy Lewis is Tony Stark's Daughter, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Long Distance Slowish-Build (Steve and Darcy), M/M, Mostly a friendship fic, Multi, SHIELD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-05-08 08:56:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 54,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5491298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitz_mack/pseuds/fitz_mack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things are stirring in the dark corners of Shield. All Darcy Lewis wants is to keep what she has only just found. Her family.</p><p>If she wants to keep it, she'll have to fight for it every step of the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Darcy Does Some Digging

**Author's Note:**

> This work is inspired by my thoughts: Why don't more people know that Shield was HYDRA in Captain America 2? This is basically my answer to that thought.
> 
> I will do my best to make sure that you don't need to have read the first work in this series to understand this one, but it is kind of harder than it looks. Please read it, it will give you a good look into who my characters are and their relationships.

“Excuse me, Ms. Lewis, but I would like to remind you that the music you are listening to is over 95 decibels. Which can cause hearing damage with prolonged exposure,” Jarvis spoke to the young woman, censure clear in his voice.

Jarvis didn’t expect to be paid attention to. In fact, he was entirely unsurprised when she simply waved her hand in dismissal and continued staring at the almost wall-to-wall holo displays set up in Tony’s living room in the Tower.

“Do you believe in love after love?!?” Darcy was shouting, off tune, to the thumping beat of Cher electronic remixes. She had already listened to the best of 2000’s Cher, and was working her way through it one more time. Her hair whipped back and forth, sometimes getting in her eyes but never for long, since she looked back and forth between the 8 holo displays currently flashing, numbers and symbols moving slowly past the screens. In the top left corner, there was a stream of music videos, blogs and her favorite twitter feeds. Just in case the work she was doing inspired her to have a clever tweet.

It was currently 4:15 in the afternoon, in the beginning of March, and she had been up long before the sun rose at 6:24am that morning. If she had taken a moment to take a break from the frantic coding she was doing, she would have realized she had missed breakfast. And lunch.

Thankfully, Jarvis had sent Dum-E to hand her hourly coffee or diet coke refills, along with meal-replacement protein smoothies that Tony preferred. (Though Jarvis had to replace the kale with spinach, and beets with oranges. Darcy and Tony were similar, but not that similar). Darcy’s manic sprees of inspiration, while not dissimilar to Bruce, Jane and Tony, were fewer and further between. For the most part, she was more of a slow and steady kind of girl.

Still, she had her moments.

Right then, that was one of her moments. She was elbow deep, metaphorically, in computer code she had made to weed in and out of Shield’s systems. Darcy he had embedded the Trojan program and secretly wrestled a server from within Shield almost two years ago. When Clint showed up at her doors to recuperate from more broken bones than she could count, and Coulson asked her to secure him access within Shield to everything related to Strike Team Delta, she had done as he had asked without reservation. To this day, she still doesn't know what prompted the request. She hasn't worked up the courage to ask.

What Darcy had built before was the technological equivalent of a little rat. More specifically, it was an artificial intelligence with a comparable amount of intelligence as a rat. She set it loose in Shield to find specific cheeses, moving quietly inside the walls and holes of Shield’s information network, and bringing back the information to a secure information dumping site in a isolated server that she could access and review at her leisure. In order to be extra secure, the server containing the pilfered information was heavily fortified, and Darcy accessed it sparingly in order to reduce the chance of detection. It would only ever send an outgoing message if it registered somebody important to her had died.

It had been incredibly slow going. Her initial coding was done slowly, over the course of months. Darcy had to poke, methodically, at restricted network after restricted network to make sure there weren’t any traps for her digital rat. It would be easy to break through their firewalls, _Child’s play,_ she would think ungratefully. The real challenge was to do it without being detected.

For the most part, Darcy had to content herself with recovering fragmented data, using timestamps and drawing conclusions between seemingly unconnected information gathered by her little rat. The only way she had been able to keep track of Coulson, Clint and Natasha, thus far, was because Coulson had her learn their call-signs, time frames of missions, asset numbers and report codes. Anything beyond them, unless it was directly in information she already had access to, was like trying to capture a single strand of smoke in a burning building.

Expanding that to all of the Avengers was infinitely more complicated than her original work. A few weeks ago, when she first updated her rat to start seeking information on all of the Avengers, her program had followed a data trail it was hunting on Bruce but hit a wall. A wall that, with the little information the rat did find, she found out was a secure file storage that would cause the physical servers to literally explode if it was accessed without proper authorization. Thankfully, her program operated passively, not actively, so she didn’t trigger any defenses that would have revealed her presence.

The further Darcy had started digging in order to learn how to make her program effective in tracking all Avengers related information, the more she discovered that there were redundancies upon redundancies inside Shield. She stumbled across something called Level 10 security, which she didn’t even know existed until Coulson explained it to her (“Level 10 security is so far beyond you, I don’t ever want to hear you say it out loud. If you did, you might literally be assassinated,” was all Coulson actually said). Mission and intelligence reports used coding labels that weren’t explained anywhere in Shield databases. Expense report accounts were patterned in a way she hadn't yet managed to understand. Emails were nearly impossible to access since they were strictly intranet. Her program was mostly only able to recovered dumped deleted email data, but it was fragments at best.

She hadn’t realized how it was nigh on impossible for any one person to review all of the information there was, especially the information that might be deliberately hidden. Shield was so big, data outflowing from dozens of bases, thousands of employees, gigabytes and gigabytes of data in a single day. Not even accounting for firewalls and other defenses. Finding patterns, especially when they were obscured in the deluge, was currently beyond her.

Up to now, quite simply, her little rat wasn’t sophisticated enough to sort through it all. She needed to turn her little rat into a ninja cat.

“Hey Jarvis,” she asked, gesturing with her left hand to the volume controls there, making a turning motion to the left, to lower the volume. While she brought her right hand up, expanding the display where Jarvis was currently debugging the overhaul to some the last part of the search algorithms she had finished just a while ago. “How goes the debugging?”

“At 98.7%, estimated completion time: one minute,” came Jarvis’ response. Despite the curt tone, Jarvis was enjoying himself immensely. Darcy threw a winning smile to the ceiling, making sure he saw that she was onto him.

“What are your thoughts, buddy?” she said, gesturing to another screen. On that screen, the only one not related to the Shield program she was working on, she was tweaking the vector analysis for the electromagnetic and gravitational field data Jane had sent her. It was Jane's preliminary results of the space-time distortions created by the Convergence that Thor had been taking her to explore. She still had to do her main job as Senior Research Administrator for Special Projects for Stark Industries. Basically, it was her job to get the best work out of Tony, Bruce and Jane. There were other scientists, technically, reporting to her, but they were unimportant in the scheme of things.

“Exploiting dump copies of databases created during system updates and vulnerabilities where information is transferred between multiply encrypted file systems, should vastly improve your restricted data access.” Jarvis conceded, reluctantly. “It will be slow going but, overall, I believe your new data mining artificial intelligence is inspired. I have taken the liberty of highlighting my suggestions on your improvements to the …” there was a sigh in his voice, Darcy smiled at this, “‘Cover-your-ass’ and ‘you-don’t-see-me’ portions of the code.”

These were the codes she wrote to make sure that her digital presence, when she was doing something incredibly illegal, was undetectable. To her knowledge they worked like a charm, since only a handful of people knew she had access to Shield networks. Those people she trusted implicitly.

“All done, Ms. Lewis.” Jarvis asked, queuing up his own signal obfuscation software to deploy for when they accessed Shield. _A little extra security couldn’t hurt_ , he would think. “Would you like to do a test now?”

“Give me a moment, Jay?” She said, formula’s spinning in the air as she switched back and forth between the different reading's Jane had supplied her, writing up notes in a flurry to be cleaned up and sent later. The moment she was done with that, she gestured to close out that screen and return to her coding project. Her hands flashed around her in a blur, pulling up screens, typing at a furious pace, before moving to the next.

In these moments, so much like a computer herself, her head felt like it was humming. Sometimes it felt like her mind was a river and instead of hitting the ocean and dissipating, it split off into different streams that were all the same size and force, relentlessness. It was why she could follow the overwhelming amount of information on the screen, fixing conditions and operation signs as she went. Tony, at his most frantic and most caffeinated, could hold up to 8 projects in his head and work on them simultaneously without pause. Darcy was damn close to this at the moment.

“Okay, Jay,” she said, her hands and her head slowly winding down in speed when she switched her attention fully to the work that Jarvis had finished. She scrolled through some of his final suggestions, implementing some quickly that she agreed with, throwing out others that she didn’t. Doing nothing to those she thought would need more time to implement.

After about five minutes, she took a step back, hands on her hips, to surveil her (their) work. She nodded, once, decisively.

“If I’m right, most of their systems should be backing up on random schedules. Still, a few key ones should happen right around now anyway just due to chance. Open a secure connection to the server I appropriated,” she liked to use the word ‘appropriated’, it made it sound less diabolical.

She took a moment to strike a bit of a pose at her work before her, like she was Rose the Riveter, "Alright, let’s update this bad mama jama. Kitty Ninja Information Tracker (KNIT) is a go.”

“Must we call it that, Ms. Lewis?” The artificial intelligence asked, since he was still somewhat scarred by her obsession using cats in her malicious programming efforts. Jarvis had a run in with a denial of access attack called the Laser Kitten Tsunami not too long ago.

“Yup,” she popped out with her mouth, self-satisfied, as she readjusted the hipster lenses on her face. “It is perfect. People will think we’re just talking about my knitting projects.” Considering how every Avenger had at least one of her knitted creations, it was actually the perfect ruse.

“Okay, Ms. Lewis. I have used your authorization to access Hoth,” she had named her stolen Shield server after the Star Wars rebel alliance base, feeling it was very apt for her situation. “Updating program now.”

“Excellent, Jarvis. When everything is ready, narrow the search parameters just to Tony to start with.”

Jarvis did as she requested while adding, “May I ask why you have chosen Mr. Stark for the initial testing?”

Darcy looked up at the ceiling. She didn’t actually have to look up to the ceiling to make Jarvis understand that she was doing their equivalent of staring eye-to-eye, but it is a habit she hasn’t felt like breaking.

Her eyes darkened, something suspicious and clever glinting in them. “Because something tells me it will be a bigger challenge for KNIT to track everything about him than for any of the other Avengers.”

“Both sir and myself routinely sweep Shield for anything pertaining to Stark Industries,” he reassured her. Darcy was not the only one with unauthorized access to Shield files. Both Jarvis and Tony kept their toes wet in their networks. Though, neither of them have put this much time and effort into a tailored incursion of one systems. Instead, like the weapons Tony designs for the Iron Man suits, they attacked head-on to solve their problems. They were not stilettos in the dark.

Still, this did not relieve the weight of suspicion sitting like a stone in Darcy’s gut. Darcy would hope, like in the Harry Potter tales she was fond of, that the weight the suspicions in her gut was a bezoar. A cure for poisons once removed. She feared that it was something far deadlier.

“Just a suspicion, Jay-meister.” She murmured, watching the program update bar inch close to 100%. "Just a suspicion."

What she didn't say was that, almost a year ago, there was something Natasha told Darcy that had rung in her head and continued to echo around in the brunette's brain. Darcy asked Natasha about the Russian's most recent mission. Darcy had made homemade dark hot chocolate for the assassin, thinking in a small part of herself that the sweet drink could bestow some comfort. Natasha had responded, without inflection, by saying, 'I am never sent out for just one thing, lapochka. My objectives are always many and never, ultimately, for the good of anyone but myself and, perhaps, for Shield.'

“Of course, Ms. Lewis,” He said placating. Darcy simply rolled her eyes. “The program is now ready for launch. KNIT’s parameters have been narrowed to Anthony Edward Stark, AKA Iron Man. Activation on your command.”

“Launch, Jarvis,” she said, rubbing her hands together, as all of the screens before her went completely blank. In the next instant, they showed a virtual representation of the data file system in the Hot server.

A minute passed, with no sign of incoming data to be found. Darcy started to tap her toes, turning off the electronic music completely in the background.

Minute two hit, and there was still nothing.

She broke the silence at minute three, “Do you think something went wrong?”

The nerves started to build up inside her like a tidal wave, she pulled up an additional screen to the side of the current set. She started frantically preparing counter-measures against returned digital attacks in case they were discovered. Even worse, she started to frantically pull up her blackmail materials in her ‘Just In Case I’m Discovered’ folder hidden in her folder of Cher music. Ultimately, if it came down to it, she knew she would just face whoever was coming after her, shrug non-committedly, and say ‘I’m Tony Stark's daughter, so suck it.’

“My connection to KNIT has not shown any alarms have been set off, Ms. Lewis.” Jarvis said, not being able to venture more of himself into the connection. He was too big to not be detected in Shield’s systems.

They both let out sighs of breath (or Jarvis it was a digital sigh) went the first trickles of files and folder started appearing on the screen by minute five.

What was a trickle quickly and rapidly became an outpouring of data, like trying to slowly turn on the water in your bathtub only to accidentally set it to the highest setting. Gigabytes of data, more than all of the information already secured on Hoth, started pouring in.

“Shit shit shit,” Darcy called out. “Jarvis, what’s our storage capacity on this server?”

“A few terabytes, Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis called out, evaluating to to see if he would have to try to slow the inpouring of information. “I’m running an analysis on the information flood. We should still be under capacity.”

She brought up the same diagnostics Jarvis was looking at for the KNIT program. “Okay, well. If it looks like we approach capacity, we’re going to have to start emptying the server’s saved data into our own network.”

“That would make us very vulnerable to detection, Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis pointed out. The server connection worked more like a window, letting them peek in. Bringing something out, especially large amounts of data, was a risk.

“I know, Jay,” she bit out, anxious at the flood of data. She hadn’t anticipated this. Neither of them did. “Something must have been wrong with our search parameters. But we can’t safely terminate the KNIT program without potentially starting fires throughout every Shield system that exists.”

“Of course, Ms. Lewis,” he said, preparing his arsenal of safeguards to prepare to do a mass data transfer just in case. “Shall I let Mr. Stark know of our current predicament?”

Tony was currently out on a date with Bruce and Pepper. It was the first chance the three had to go on a date in a while. Darcy was determined to not interrupt. Plus, Jarvis was the sensible one, not her.

“Last resort, Jay.” She nodded, a breath in her chest unclenching as she saw the data flow wind down back into a trickle. After a few more moments, it slowed fully to a stop.

Darcy’s heart was pounding in her chest. She suppressed the urge to panic with an iron fist. “Okay, Jay. First things first, have KNIT go dark until we can be sure there haven’t been any breaches.”

She started clicking through some of the data folders at random, most of it labeled chronologically by date from what she could tell. _I’m glad Jarvis recommended we do that_ , she would think.

“Jarvis, you can do it faster than me. Can you make sure this information is relevant to our search?” She asked, though Jarvis was carefully ruffling through the data there.

“It all appears to be relevant to Mr. Stark.” He said, though not done with his sweep. He had to move through folders one by one, not being able to launch his more sophisticated search protocols. He continued on with the search.

“We’re going to have a lot of stuff to sort through,” she stated obviously.

On the screen, to her left, was an Intel report from a threat assessment analyst dated close to three months before the events of Stark Expo where Vanko had trashed a legion of metal robots.

Intelligence Report

No. 5755-QRQ-2077       Date: Feb 20, 2013

REDACTED (Asset# 010072/PA-9-2) AND ESTIMATION OF DEATH BY HEAVY METAL POISINING

Restricted Security Information Level: __REDACTED__

Analyst: __REDACTED___

Supervising Analyst: __REDACTED__

Urgency: Omicron

Report Made To: __REDACTED__

Supporting Information:

  * Heart Functionality – preliminary health analysis after retrieval from REDACTED, copied from secure servers of USAF, shows presence of shrapnel in chest cavity. REDACTED device in chest likely generating electromagnetic field to prohibit movement of shrapnel towards heart. SHIELD Medical Consultant #1224 estimated survival timeline of 15 minutes without REDACTED (Ref: Intelligence Report No. 5743-QRQ-1009) 
    * Conclusion: REDACTED cannot go without REDACTED device in chest without dying
  * REDACTED Technology – Research on REDACTED technology under Shield Founder REDACTED (Asset# 000002/CA-9-1) and REDACTED (Threat# 000109/CT-2-7), relies heavily on REDACTED as a catalytic agent in power generation. Trace amounts of REDACTED is released from the REDACTED device as a byproduct. Rate of excretion is exponential as power source is depleted. Protective covering on REDACTED in REDACTED Factory in Miami is to protect from contamination. (Ref: Department of Science- Division of Science Analytics Report No. 4120-ART-2221) 
    * Conclusion: REDACTED is being exposed to REDACTED due to REDACTED in chest
  * Rate of Poisoning Estimate –  using updated REDACTED device model approximations of REDACTED byproduct generation, preliminary estimates would reach lethal toxicity within 12 months of initial exposure. Without further information on REDACTED device designs, all estimates are preliminary. (Ref: Department of Science – Division of Science Analytics Report No. 4740-ART-1999) 
    * Conclusion: Conservative estimates predict less than four months before lethal toxicity is reached.
  * Change in Behavior – reports from permanent surveillance team indicate a change in behavior, re: gift giving, has not taken off shirt in public since retrieval, increased frequency of imbibing unknown substances in obscure containers in public (Ref: Intelligence Report No 5754-QRQ-0021) 
    * Conclusion: REDACTED is aware of his condition.



Summary: REDACTED (AKA “REDACTED”) will die without REDACTED device, but REDACTED device is exposing him to toxic levels of REDACTED. Prognosis: Death Imminent (Possibility for improvement remains, considering track record and asset in question)

Recommended Courses of Action:

  * Priority 1 (AWAITING APPROVAL) - Gain Access to REDACTED Industries Before Imminent Death – Threat of technology in a single government or terrorist group hands, extreme. Acquisition of all REDACTED Tech not made available to public, highly suggested. Recommending a single operative to infiltrate REDACTED Industries at highest level available at time of deployment. Highly specialized skill set will be needed with expertise in infiltration, espionage, and hacking for this assignment. (Operation Deployment Request No. 5882-WU; Personnel Request Form No. 5882-WU; Equipment Requisition Request No. 5882-WU; Estimated Project Expense Report No. 5882-WU).
  * Priority 2 (APPROVED) - Stop Gap Measure in Treating or Alleviating Symptoms of Poisoning by REDACTED and Other Heavy Metals – Research in alleviating symptoms of heavy metal poisoning, particularly REDACTED, is in development. Progress, promising. A full treatment - currently beyond Shield scientific capabilities. (Ref: Medical Department Project No. 1772-BIOCHEM-12, “Project Re-Forge”).
  * Priority 3 (DENIED) - Seek Alternative Catalytic Element to Replace REDACTED – Currently beyond Shield’s scientific capabilities (Ref: Department of Science – Division of Science Analytics Report No. 5120-ART-2221)



Final analysis of the material contained in this report was concluded on February 20, 2013 by the SHIELD Department of Intelligence – Division of Persons of Interest and Division of Asset & Threat Assessment.

“Jarvis?” Darcy asked, eyes skimming over the report, rage clawing at her throat like a trapped badger at the Priority 1 suggestion.

“Yes, Ms. Lewis?” He responded, his voice as cold as a bar of ice.

“Did you ever see any of this stuff when you were in their servers?” She asked, hands shaking.

“No, Ms. Lewis. I can only assume that, having anticipated sir’s hacking, they have gone to great lengths to hide this information. Looking at the data stamp, I believe this was housed on an isolated network outside of Shield’s.” Jarvis does something very similar with the most sensitive data about the Avengers available to him. He housed the information in secret server strong-hold, backed-up weekly at random times but only after deploying security measures to ensure the server could not be discovered or accessed. He has remote protocols to wipe it if it is ever breached. “I believe we were lucky that KNIT appears to have been launched at the beginning of the data dump into the isolated network.”

“Well, fuck,” she said, simply, before Jarvis had a chance to respond. “Jay, I’m going to take a nap. When I’m awake again, we need to start working on getting information on all the other avengers without depleting all the space on the Hoth server.”


	2. No Fire and Brimstones, But Pepper, Tony and Bruce Are So Much Worse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy shows Tony what they found.
> 
> AKA No fire and brimstone just yet, but there is a reason Tony was a successful CEO despite his problems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've noticed, this now my second fic in this story, that I am both very wordy and also build things kind of slowly. This is just as a heads up, if you didn't already know this and weren't prepared for the journey I'm going to take you all on.
> 
> Warnings: A little bit of polyamorous fun; Father/Daughter Feels; More revealing what Shield has been gathering; setting up future plot points

Later that night, Darcy was curled up on Tony’s couch, desperately wanting to fall back asleep but was simultaneously far too wired to do so. Her earlier 90 minute mini-sleep (anything above 30 minutes was no longer a nap in the brunette’s opinion), had left her with enough energy to help Jarvis tey to sort through the tons of data they had collected from Shield’s servers.

So far, what they discovered, had been extensive. In fact, they hadn't been able to make a dent in it in the limited time they had before Tony would return. Instead, they had been banging their heads together to think of a way to transfer the data into their storage. There just wasn’t enough capacity on the Hoth server to run the analysis of the data remotely, especially with the information still discoverable while it was housed behind Shield firewalls. For now, they were limited to looking from file to file, essentially shooting in the dark.

At this point, they were still not sure how they could safely move the information into their own data banks, without setting up some serious red flags. The both admitted, only about 20 minutes ago, that they needed Tony’s help.

“So, you’re saying some of this stuff is about Howard Stark?” She asked, adjusting minutely every couple of seconds to get into a more comfortable position on the couch. She was curious. The only things she knew about Howard Stark were from Wikipedia. But, knowing what she knew about Tony, touching those files herself would be not good. She would let Jarvis handle that, he already knew much more about Howard Stark and was, therefore, less likely to cause an emotional explosion about it.

“I cannot determine the amount, Ms. Lewis, without the ability to catalog and sweep the data more thoroughly,” Jarvis replied, as he dimmed the lights to Darcy’s preferred napping levels. Jarvis, always knew the exact lighting, temperature and background noise preferences of all the inhabitants of the tower. He had raw data to support this knowledge. It was close to midnight, they had been hacking away at potential solutions since Darcy woke up just after dinner time. “But, yes.”

“Did you check to make sure it was directly about Tony and not just, I dunno, a side reference in a Howard Stark report?” She murmured out, finally in a warm position, curling up in a blanket Dum-E had brought her earlier.

“It is both, Ms. Lewis. I found several reports about sir dated during his childhood. Other reports, about Howard Star, appear to reference sir directly as well.”

Darcy hums acceptingly.

“This isn’t going to go well? Is it Jarvis?” She said, voice tired, almost on the brink of being too tired to sleep. Tony, Bruce and Pepper were due back to the Tower at any moment.

They had spent almost 15 of the last 20 minutes arguing about whether or not to wait until the morning to tell Tony. Darcy was all for waiting, but Jarvis, who had his entire life time dealing with Tony, voted for right away. She had acceded, when she realized she was too tired to fight about it.

“I have analyzed the variables concerning Mr. Stark’s emotional responses to surveillance and intrusion. Unless you are prepared for some emotional manipulation to divert his attention from his anger, I’m afraid there is no avoiding it.” Jarvis was 92% sure that, give or take 4%, Tony was going to go nuclear. Though, when accounting for Tony’s desperate need for approval and to fix things with the people he loves, that was reduced to 47%. That was, if Darcy could perhaps cry or be upset enough to deter Tony.

“I’m too tired that if I start fake crying it will be real crying,” she hummed out, slowly relaxing when Jarvis put on the low sound of rain that Darcy enjoyed. She wasn't above using her situation to emotionally blackmail someone for their own hood. She just didn't think she had the energy to accturately steer situation to prevent it from spiraling out of control.

Darcy heard the sound of the elevator opening up to the living room area, but she didn’t move right away. She could hear the faint sound of giggling, likely Pepper. There was a dramatic thump, someone getting backed up harshly against a wall.

There was a throaty moan.

Darcy used her forearm to cover her eyes before popping up from the couch, body pointed towards where she thought the elevator was located.

“Sorry sorry sorry! I’m here.” Darcy yelped out, a little bit terrified. “Please have your clothes on!”

The belly-deep laugh, tinged with self-deprecation, she recognized was Bruce’s. From the hitches in his voice, Darcy was even able to guess that someone was still doing something to him to cause those huffs. Darcy was going to be scarred by this. For life.

“Why is this my life?” Bruce asked back to the elevator wall, Tony on his left in front of him, Pepper on his right. Pepper was kissing the shorter man, bruisingly, hand fisted into his curly hair drawing his head back. Tony had reluctantly removed his hand from Bruce’s dark, charcoal gray slacks, while backing off nibbling Pepper's neck.

“What are you doing here, kid?” Tony asked, voice still wrecked, peaking to the side in order to look out of the elevator. Pepper readjusted her stunning white, shoulder-less, short tube dress.

“Is something wrong, Darcy?” Pepper asked, voice concerned but level, no hint of shame anywhere to be found. Being the sensible one, she recognized Darcy wouldn’t be here when the trio were on a group date, without something serious going on.

“Can I uncover my eyes now?” Darcy asked, the bright purple sweater hanging loosely over her forearm covering her eyes.

“Yes, we’re decent.” Bruce responded, fixing Tony’s red tie, while Tony smoothing down the lines of the Bruce’s sports coat.

With a sheepish smile, Darcy dropped her forearm, and immediately decided to ignore the disheveled state of the three people before her.

“Sorry. I thought Jarvis,” Darcy said accusatorily towards the ceiling, “would have given you a head’s up that I would be here.”

“Forgive me, I did not wish to interrupt your pleasant evening out just yet,” he responded, indignantly.

The three newcomers to the scene immediately tensed, striding into the Living Room, heading towards Darcy.

“What did you both do?” Tony said. “What happened?” came Bruce. “What do you need?” asked Pepper. All at once.

Before Darcy or Jarvis had a chance to respond, Tony brought out a thin, rollable tablet that he just developed. Pepper was on her phone, ready to call the thousands of people that would almost definitely murder someone if the blond woman asked. Bruce was heading to the kitchen. To make tea most likely.

Jarvis, for once, verbalized his cough of discomfort over the sound system. “Ms. Lewis has stumbled across some information that she wished to share.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Way to throw me under the bus, Jar-douche.”

“It was your program that got us into this mess, Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis shot back.

“Don’t act like you weren’t a kid in a candy shop with some of that code, buddy. You’re just as culpable as me.” She was stalling, she knew she was stalling but it was like she couldn’t help it.

Bruce, like lightning, had four mugs of tea already going and brought them back to the living room. He started passing out mugs all around. Before Tony or Pepper could react, Bruce asked “Is this something you need all of us present for, Darcy and Jarvis?”

Tony, continuing to type on his table, “Well, they have about 45 seconds before I remote access the network logs to see what they’ve been doing.” He took the mug with one hand, fingers caressing along Bruce’s. “So, you should totally stay here big-guy. If you go mean and green, then I know whatever my response is will be totally justified.”

Pepper nodded along, taking off her heels and curling her legs under her on the couch, as Bruce sat on her other side, framing her between the two men. Pepper stared at Darcy, the smile Pepper got when she was amused by the geniuses in her life. Darcy might not know she was one of those geniuses, but she was.

“If this causes the Stark stock to drop points, again,” she elbowed Tony gently in the ribs, before returning to Darcy with the full weight of her amusement. “I will make you handle to PR and do all the work personally to speed up the timeline to deploy the new Stark Laptop.”

“Yeah, all of you should be here for this.” Darcy said, cupping her hands over the mug of tea to absorb the heat, not knowing that Bruce had actually made hers decaffeinated when he saw the exhaustion painted on the girl’s face.

When she hesitated, Tony finally looked up from his tablet and sipping his tea, eyes sweeping over the young woman in analysis. His face softened somewhat, “Hey, what is it? Do you need me to buy something? Bail? Did you discover a way to destroy the world with one of your hack jobs?” He let out a ‘pffft’ of air, gesturing around with his now free hand before Pepper caught it. “That’s like, a normal Tuesday for me. Don’t sweat it, kid.”

Darcy smiled at his strangeness. Everyone in the room kind of vaguely shook their heads at the mad scientist’s attempt at reassurance.

“Okay Jarvis. Let’s go dark. Highest level,” she said. The room didn’t go physically dark, it was a command to take control over every ingoing and outgoing signal into this area of the Tower. Even the windows of the tower would subtly start reflecting more light and letting less light in, to get in the way of long range photography. It was a shadow protocol developed by Darcy and Tony, sending out believable fake data to potential surveillance systems, in order to hide real information. Most spy agencies would kill people for this tech.

“Pull up the first report we found on the large screen,” she said, gesturing them all to take a look at the first report. As they all read the screen, she continued on, “As you all probably know, I’ve been hacking into Shield almost since I starTed getying involved in all their business. I’ve recently launched a new program, Kitty Ninja Information Tracker,” Bruce smiled into his tea, “to do more sophisticated, and undetectable sweeps. This is the kind of information we found.”

“How much did you find, Darcy?” Pepper was actually the first to react, the woman’s ability to understand political implications and human nuance by far the best in the room. Her mind already started crafting scenarios, thinking through possibilities of perhaps destroying the funding streams of Shield’s major donor governments. Perhaps, collapse one or two of the more volatile but sympathetic regimes supporting them in West Africa.

Tony stood, moving closer to the screen. He gestured at the screen, causing it to enlarge at the line that said he had a “permanent surveillance team” attached to him. His mouth twisted under his goatee, looking like Popeye before spinach. He swiped it to the side, making the loop-de-loop gesture that would bring all the most recently closed windows open once more.

He saw the storage vault that the Hoth server had become, gesturing through file folder after file folder on him. There were screens with the source code for KNIT and the searching Darcy and Jarvis have managed thus far.

“A lot,” was Darcy’s answer, the visual speaking more than her words.

“Hey, lovers mine,” Tony asked out loud, voice innocent and contemplative, having opened at random an intelligence report from when he made Dum-E when he was 17. “Is it still genocide if you only wipe an agency off the map?”

“Maybe. Though it is usually a term used to refer to killing particular ethnic or national groups,” Bruce chimed in. Only his vast experience with anger was keeping him from going green. He, more than any of them, understood the government wanting to take everything that belonged to you. Even if the only thing left to you was your own body.

“I think mass murder would technically be more accurate.” Pepper’s voice was glacial. She was reading everything scrolling quickly past Tony’s hand. She had learned to speed read in her first year as his assistant, otherwise she would never have been able to keep up with the genius.

“I feel like right now would be a good time for everyone to chill out a bit,” Darcy said, reluctantly. “We have some immediate problems to address, before we decide a course of action.”

“Hmmm … I didn’t realize they have a list of every person I’ve ever slept with.” He stated out loud, looking at one of the random files that he opened up. "I didn't even know I slept with some of these people. The Swedish Women's Soccer team is an exaggeration. It was only, like, five of them. And only two of the men on the Men's team."

“Darcy, is there anything in there after about two years ago?” Pepper asked the young woman, pulling up on her phone a copy of the contract she had drawn up for Tony to work as a “Consultant” with Shield.

Tony continued on, not really hearing what was going on around him, “Jessica Dallows in 2007 claimed I fathered her child. Suit was dismissed out of hand, but they sent an agent to collect the boy's DNA at his pre-school, just in case. Came back negative. I don’t think I even slept with Jessica Dallows. I would have remembered those bangs.” Bruce came up behind the man, shaking in rage, to rest his hands gentle against Tony’s shoulders. “Terrible bangs.”

“I think so, yes,” Darcy answered Pepper’s question. The brunette’s brains was tapped for the night, she was having trouble concentrating her thoughts to remember if the stuff she had seen was relevant.

“Why’s that important, Pep?” Bruce asked, looking back to the other two women, while he tried to massage out some of the tension growing in Tony’s shoulders.

“Tony,” Darcy bit out, gesturing sharply to her eyes with two fingers, “Focus.” Tony’s eyes, shining with an anger not unlike one of his repulsor blasts, finally settled on Darcy’s cool blue eyes.

Pepper answered Bruce’ question. “Our contract with Shield for Tony to work for them as a consultant, with significantly reduced fees, specifically prohibits active monitoring, illegal acquisition or reverse engineering of proprietary Stark tech, and a couple of other stipulations. If there is anything after that was signed, they would be in breach of contract.” Pepper was queuing up messages to her lawyers on her phone for when the data black-out around the living room went off. Pepper’s lawyers were ruthless, amoral assholes. They always delighted when she gave them a new target, going into a frenzy like sharks with blood in the water.

“I don’t know if there is any our tech,” Darcy answered, stumbling over the ‘our.’ She understood that she _worked for_ Stark Industries but it still hadn't sunk in viscerally was a part of Stark Industries. “All of that information is still being housed inside Shield. I’m 99% positive some of it is coded to set off an alarm if it leaves Shield’s network. We won’t be able to do a more extensive analysis until we can do more than just look at it. I’ll need your help with that,” she said, directing her comment to Tony at the end, “because Jarvis and I have been wracking our brains for the last few hours. We’re stuck.”

Bruce finally managed to get Tony to return to the coach, putting Tony between Pepper and himself. The unassuming man, not equipped to deal with intrigue on this level, let the others figure things out. He wormed one of his hands into Tony’s fist, rubbing gentle circles on his knuckles.

“Why didn’t you call us sooner?” Tony asked.

“We did not wish to intrude on the first night you have had out with Dr. Banner and Ms. Potts in some time,” Jarvis placated Tony. Tony could hear a strain in Jarvis’ voice synthesizers. Though he didn’t need to sleep like a human did, Tony had built periodic data dumping and refresh cycles into Jarvis. Otherwise, the AI might think himself to critical system failure by indefinitely processing new data, learning from his learning, and so on. It was an outlet that allowed him to operate like a human being. Tony realized he must not have used it in a while, from the sound of it.

“This is what we are going to do,” Tony said out load, possibilities flashing in his head and discarded almost as quickly. He was moving past hot anger into stone-cold rage. The kind of rage that allowed him to build his first suit in Afghanistan, the rage that he felt towards Aldrich Killian. His voice had gone calm.

“Darcy, Jarvis and I will work on a secure data transfer mechanism tomorrow. I’ll review your work on KNIT, kudos on the naming by the way, and we’ll go from there. Once we know what they know or have stolen from us, we’ll come up with a counter-move. They get nothing more from us from here on out."

“Pepper, you get the sharks ready. I want all of our options, up to and including the complete dismantling of Shield, ready to go as soon as you can,” he said, kissing her knuckles lovingly. “Be as discreet as possible.”

Pepper, uncharacteristically, rolled her eyes. She had been picking up some of Darcy’s habits. “I’ve had those ready since day one, Tony.”

“Bruce, until further notice, you are handling all official contact with Shield for the Starks,” he gestured around at everyone in the room. “Pepper will come up with a good explanation to give to their faces. They wouldn’t dream of trying to shake you for additional information, not wanting to set you off. On the plus, when we do have a counter-strategy ready, they will be more likely to make concessions to the immediate threat of you than the long term threat of the rest of us.”

“Of course, Tony.” Bruce ducked his head into Tony’s shoulder. Something warm swelled up in his gut, to be included as one of the Starks. Just like that. Like it wasn’t a promise and a declaration.

“In the meantime, everyone go dark when in private. I don’t want anyone here alone with anyone from Shield.” His face had gone as hard as granite. “Including Agents Coulson, Barton and Romanov. At least, until we know how much of this they were aware of.” Everyone recognized his use of their last names as a distancing mechanism. Tony always called Coulson by a nickname, unless he was angry or mad. "Jarvis, I want you passively monitoring all of them until I say otherwise."

Darcy sighed, bundling up in her blanket once more, forcing her eyes closed. _If Tony loses trust in them, this will break the Avengers_.

“Tony, that won’t work.” she responded back to the engineer, picking her battles by deciding to say nothing on the monitoring just yet. “I stay with Clint more than I stay with you when I stay in the tower.”

“Then you’ll just have to stay here, then,” Tony bit back. Neither Pepper nor Bruce said anything to the irrational anger coming off from the man. They knew when not to interfere when Tony got this way.

“I trust Clint,” Darcy admitted, rubbing at her eyes. Tony narrowed in suspicion at her, recognizing it but not yet confirming it as one of her tools for manipulating him. “More than anyone. If he knew something, he would have told me.”

He leaned forward,one of each of his lovers' hands in one of his own. “Then are you prepared to ask him if Romanov and Coulson knew? Are you prepared to push him to be on our side? Because this,” he gestured at the screen still full of damning information, "this is not acceptable. If they have this on me, who knows what they have on the rest of us. Can you be sure they tell didn't tell Shield you're my daughter? Even after all the Avengers agreed to keep it secret to protect you?"

Darcy remembered that team meeting vividly. It was the evening after Pepper and Darcy had nearly been kidnapped on the street. It was awkward and messy. Tony, both strangely proud and desperately wanted to show off, but also hesitant. Darcy, relieved to know but askward, having to readjust her whole world view about her dead, perfect parents and their perfect relationship. Bruce was the one that cautioned them all against a declaration, pointing out the many kidnappings that have already happened and how many more would occur if the information leaked. 

“Asking about his loyalty to Shield? Fine. But you want me to use my friendship with Clint, pitting that against his loyalty to Natasha and Coulson?” She asked, angrily. A part of her knew that this was going to happen. A part of her knew that it was inevitable, the moment she opened those Shield files. The other part of her, the biggest part of her, was afraid that this might spell the end of something good in her life. 

Darcy choked out, “That’s not fair." She looked to Pepper and Bruce, asking them silently with her eyes to intervene.

Pepper shook her head, “He’s right Darcy. It isn’t fair but you have to ask. Otherwise, we’re going to have to figure this out without all of them. It will be easier to do it if we knew they were on our side.”

“Hey,” Bruce said to her, reassuringly. “You and Clint will be just fine. You know it will eat at you if you don’t talk to him about it. But you have to do it before something else comes up first.”

Darcy took a couple of deep breaths, breathing in the comforting smell of clean laundry detergent and burnt metal. Dum-E had brought her the blanket she made for Tony’s couch in his workshop.

“Okay,” she said, voice defeated. They all sat in silence.

Tony grabbed Pepper and Bruce’s hands tightly, nudging them up to stand with him. “I’m going to go have hot, angry sex with my two best people.” Pepper swatted his head. Bruce blushed.

“Overshare,” Darcy and Jarvis let out simultaneously, though Jarvis added a ‘Mr. Stark’ in there.

Tony smiled, the tension broken now. He let go of Bruce and Pepper’s hands, stepping towards Darcy. The young girl had not moved out from under her blanket since the whole conversation began. Tony’s eyes softened, rage banking back a bit, at the exhaustion evident on the girl’s face.

“If you’re anything like me, Darcy,” he said, bringing his hand up to wipe away a strand of her stuck to her cheek. “You must be exhausted. Get some sleep, we’ll meet in the morning.”

He did something he never thought he would do. Tony kissed Darcy gently on the top of her head.

The gesture caused them both to think of absent parents and the disappointment of childhood. Tony, reminded of a woman a quarter of a century dead, and bed times in a cold Stark Manor. Darcy, of a green-eyed man with silly side burns, kissing her scrapes away.

“You did good,” Tony said, tapping down her wild hair. He had a rock in his throat, choking on the next words on his tongue. Words he had never heard and never allowed himself the opportunity to say. “Proud of you, kid.”


	3. One Spy Down, Two To Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy confront Clint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this chapter is meant to highlight the relationship between Clint and Darcy. It doesn't resolve anything, but I felt it was true to the two of them.
> 
> Warnings: Violence (threat of); Mentions of Child Abuse; Clint's childhood is a lot darker than I planned; Attempted Murder and Actual Murder

The room was pitch black, the glass windows were all dark and not letting in any of bright lights of the city just on the other side. The sun, still low and far behind the horizon, started to dilute the dark haziness of the sky, like slowly dripping water into ink.

A low chime echoed throughout the room, starting off so softly that the girl on the bed did not even stir. The chime slowly increased in volume. Had the girl had been awake, she might not have noticed the volume change.

The girl finally twitched when the chime approached 30% of full volume. By the time it reached 40%, she had rolled over once, pulling the blankets over her head tightly, a pillow folded around her head.

By the time the alarm reached 50% volume, the lights starting to flicker on in darkness of the room. The girl mumbled something unintelligible underneath the blanket. The alarm and lights turn off at the girl’s mumbling. What she probably had said was, “Turn off the alarm,” but it would be hard for anyone to say for sure.

The girl, in moments, fell back into a restless slumber. She was dreaming some unintelligible nightmare about unexpectedly discovering she had not, as she thought, unenrolled from a class and would need to complete a semester’s worth of work in a day if she wanted to graduate.

The knock on her door came unexpectedly.

The knock sounded more like somebody was kicking the frame than simply knocking. It reverberated through the wood, startling the girl out of the fetal position into more of a planking position.

“Get up, Darce!” Came the voice, loud but deep, from the other side of the door. “Coulson and Natasha aren’t here. So I’m just going to get louder until you wake up.”

“Fuck you, Clint!” Darcy moaned out into the soft warmth of her pillow, unintentionally rubbing her face into a small pile of drool that had accumulated there. She wiped at her face with a pajama covered hand, disgusted.

He started banging on the door in random, alternating patterns. Prohibiting the girl from even attempting to try to return to sleep.

“You’re the one who wanted to practice hand-to-hand with me,” he called out sweetly between knocks.

“Gods damn it,” she mumbled to herself, face stuffed under a pillow once more as she reached over the side of her bed. The room still dark so her hand patted around in a random search pattern looking for something.

She called out, loudly, “The sun isn’t even up!” When she found a shoe, she tossed it without looking in the direct of the door.

It hit the wall with a dull thump, several inches from the door. The room flared to full brightness, since she had unintentionally hit the touchpad control panel for the lighting system.

“Come on Darcy,” Clint knocked hard. “Get” another booming knock, “up.” Knock, “Get” knock “up.” He kept going for several seconds before he heard the muffled thump of defeat.

Darcy, groaning, had tried rolling over to get into a position to untangle herself from the blankets. Instead, she rolled off the bed completely, groaning the whole way.

“Yes,” he shouted, throwing his hands in the air. “I’m going to go make a mango chia-seed and a kiwi chia-seed workout smoothie. If you are out of bed in 5 minutes, you can pick which one you get.”

-

“You’ve been doing really well with the Wing Chun and Krav Maga,” Clint said to Darcy, as he arched his back. “Not black belt level, yet. But still, are you sure you wouldn’t prefer I teach you marksmanship instead?”

Clint and Darcy were going through their stretch and warm-up routine at the gym. Pepper was off in a corner on a treadmill, headphones in, discreetly practicing running in five inch heels. She also happened to be taking a conference call and speaking in an Asian language Darcy didn’t know and what Clint knew was actually Korean.

“Those are all good for exercise and in theory,” Darcy explained, pulling her ankle up behind her back, stretching her quads as she pulled her foot inward. “I need more work for combat situations.”

They were on the mats, which took up half of the gym proper. The sparring room, which was a room located just off the gym, was better designed and had in-built control settings to change the environment. The gym mats were just as good if you wanted a light spar before or after a workout, which made this ideal for the pair.

Clint was hopping in place. “Okay, Darce. Before we start, I have a question for you.” He was staring at Darcy, evaluating every movement the girl went through as she limbered up.

“Go for it, Bird-man,” Darcy said, deliberately avoiding his eye by stretching out to reach the tip of her toes.

“Why did you want to spend our semi-monthly one on one mornings doing this instead of something more … brunch themed?” His voice remained placid and focused, as he stretched on arm across his chest, pulling on his elbow, to work out his shoulders. It has been a little prone to tightening up after the last dislocation.

He noticed that Darcy’s spine tensed while she was stretching downwards, hands almost complete flat against the floor. She slowly rose back up to look Clint awkwardly in the eyes. He was standing only a few feet away from her, black skin-tight sleeve-less gym shirt and gym shorts, making him look a little like a high school gym coach. A hot gym coach, but a gym coach.

She shrugged, saying nothing for several seconds. The Shield files situation was only happened the night before last.

Darcy was staring into Clint’s blue eyes, trying to gauge the older man but there was nothing to be read from them. They weren’t cold or distant, the way Natasha’s got when she was being inscrutable, but the archer’s eyes still revealed nothing to her.

Clint exploded into action between one breath and another. Darcy barely had time to bring her right hand up to grab Clint’s left leg, redirecting it above her in order to duck under it. He had purposefully led with his non-dominant leg, since people tended to assume attacks will come at them from the other direction. The agent also wondered if the woman would be able to anticipate something unexpected.

“What the fuck, Clint?” Darcy asked, but she was already stumbling back, working to avoid the flurry of kicks coming in her direction. “Stop it with the Street Fighter Chun-Li impression.”

Instead, he started coming at her more forcefully.

It took all of her concentration to keep from getting knocked out or seriously injured. From the corner of her eye, she could see in the mirror that she was rapidly approaching the window that was streaming light into the room. She could see her shadow expand on the ground, as she moved closer to the open window. At one point, even though it starting shining directly into Clint’s eyes and Darcy could catch reflections of the morning light in his baby-blues, he didn’t flinch or hesitate in the slightest. He just kept coming at her.

She could feel the moment she was about to have her back hit the glass window. From the way she had just dodged his left leg, she knew a right kick was on the way. She had less than a moment to make a decision, and decided to dive to the left, since there was just another wall to her right. She tensed and dove. She could feel the force of the kick, glancing past her head ruffling her pony tail slightly.

The kick landed against the glass, around where Darcy’s sternum would have been. Clint’s leg hit the glass with enough force to cause the slightest crack. Just a hairline, no longer than a palm length, right beneath his heel. Considering this gym was built to handle a fully grown adult being thrown at it with Captain America strength, the force of it would easily have cracked her ribs.

“What the fuck Clint?” She asked, taking the time and force that Clint had lost by breaking the window, to return fire and kick harshly at the leg currently still resting against the wall. She gained only enough time to move back a couple of feet before Clint was turned around and ready. She gained herself a greater berth around her relentless combatant.

“Why did you want to do this, Darcy?” He asked her again, none of his normal cheer or affection for the brunette girl to be found. Pepper, off in the distance, was watching them intrigued but made no motion to intervene. The strawberry blond, with her sharp eyes and heightened reflexes, could tell that Clint was pulled his punches from her vantage point.

Pepper was the compromise for this conversation. She was just supered up enough to subdue Clint in a pickle, but not so much that she might accidentally kill anyone (like Bruce might or Tony would claim was an accident).

“I don’t know what to say,” she huffed out, the adrenaline spiking and her breathing kicking up a notch.

“You don’t understand, Darcy,” he shook his head, still no emotions to be found anywhere on his face. He was peaceful in the way a center of a tornado was peaceful. “That answer isn’t good enough.”

“What answer would be good enough?” she asked, redirecting some of the punches. Others landing slightly against her legs, sides. Slight taps (with no real force) against her face. She would not even be bruised the next day.

Darcy knew that he would hold back on her, the moment she asked him just last night to change their brunch to a practice session. Clint would always have to hold back with her. Only his lifetime of understanding his body, honing it to peak functionality, left him with the kind of control to move as quickly as he did and exert as little force so as to not actually wound Darcy. Of all the Avengers, only Natasha could spar with Darcy like this, no protective padding but pushing the brunette girl to her limit, and not be worried about injuring the girl.

“Do you understand Darcy,” the archer said between rapid fire kicks high and low that the girl only barely managed to dodge each time, “that right now only my superior training and my love for you stands between you and death?” His voice, while breathing taking on a slight heavy edge with the workout, was still calm. Wise and waiting.

He had backed her up against a glass mirrored wall. When she ducked, as he knew she would, the glass cracked under his knuckles. The thick callouses there (and along his fingertips from his bowstrings) while still sensitive, had become fortified to his brutal lifestyle.

“I picked up the bow, every day, in the circus,” he grunted out, punching rapidly towards the girl, hitting the glass mirror over and over again, as Darcy only barely moved fast enough to not take a fist to the face. “Rains, sleet, or snow.”

She finally managed to duck under an arm, to the side, and buy herself a second by trying to sweep his legs out from under him. He jumped away, every inch the acrobat, through several backflips.

He stared at her, pausing for a second before advancing once more. “If I didn’t make enough tips or pick enough pockets, Trickshot would beat me to with an inch of my life. Even then, broken and bleeding, I picked up that bow.” He said, levelly, like there wasn’t a world of broken glass and the bloody edges of belt buckles beneath his eyelids. His voice was so low that only Darcy could hear him, Pepper’s hearing not sensitive enough after extremis to hear the duo.

Darcy was struggling to hear his words, too distracted by her own elbows flying and feet dancing. Darcy was breathing hard, heart pounding in her chest. She was reacting on instinct, but that instinct constricted her vision, keeping her focus on her own body. It was a struggle to push beyond the edges of it, make herself aware of every movement from the imposing man before her, instead of overly conscious of the blood rushing in her veins and the lightning against her nerves.

“I was malnourished, 17, and bleeding out where my brother shot me in the back to leave me to die so he could get away in our last day at the circus.” He started moving faster, his fists taking on a vicious edge, but never straying beyond what the young girl could take. “I still landed an arrow through Trickshot’s throat from 1200 yards.”

Darcy knew this story already. She knew that, when the drug pushers operating through the circus realized Trickshot and Barney had been skimming off the top of their dealings, they had come calling for blood. Trickshot and Barney had left a trail of bodies in the circus, both innocent and not, in a desperate scrambled to freedom. They had left Clint, wound in back, to buy themselves a few minutes to get away, hoping the mobsters would be placated briefly by nabbing the brother. They left him for a few thousand dollars and a kilo of coke in their bags.

“Barney had killed a girl, no more than 16, to take her car. I put an arrow through the back of his head as he drove away.”

If there was one thing Clint knew, something he knew bone-deep the way normal people knew ‘Everything happens for a reason’ and ‘God is looking out for me’, it was this:

“Everything is a fight.” He explained his worldview, this dance between them, to her as purely as he knew how. He was still utterly unrelenting in his attack, however restrained and watered down it was at the moment.

“What does that even mean?” She said, throwing up her forearms to break the hold almost put her in.

“Everything is a fight. No doubt, no hesitation, you have to know what you’re fighting for. What its worth.” He pressed harder, holding back just enough not to bruise the young girl. “If you know that, then you can answer my question.”

“Why did you want to learn this?” he asked her softly, over and over, between strikes. Like a chorus to a dance.

“I don’t know what answer to give you,” Darcy let out, before she got knocked off balance and fell to the matt, bruising her tail bone. Only then, did Clint let up. Stalking back, just a dozen feet or so, but ready to launch at any second.

“If you aren’t up again in ten seconds, I’m coming after you anyway,” he said to the girl, calmly currently splayed out in an x on the mat.

“Everything is a fight,” She repeated, somewhat sarcastically, as she rose from her sitting position. She wasn’t afraid, had never been afraid around Clint. Right now, she was angry, frustrated.

Clint launched at her the moment she was on her feet. He pressed her, pushing her to her limits and then edging against them slowly, throwing each punch just a fraction of a second faster than the last. Launching a kick with just a little more force, to see if she could stabilize her weight against him as she deflected or redirected the blow. Adding an elbow, unexpectedly, here and there to see how she would compensate.

If she could access some higher level brain functions, she would realize that Clint was playing her expertly. Clint might not have the razor sharp understanding of manipulation that Natasha had. He might not get strategy like Steve. What he did know was tactics.

He knew the little moves that wins you a battle. Not the long game, the check-mate that Natasha and Steve always sought. He knew what worked right in that moment to get him where he needed to be in the next moment. It is what allowed him to track someone’s eyes and the angle of their arm and the twitch of their fingertips, and Clint could move in a way that would allow a bullet to miss him by inches. It is what made him one of the most dangerous men in the world, despite being unenhanced, able to fight shoulder to shoulder with legends. On his best days, he even had a chance in hand-to-hand against Captain America. With a bow in his hands, he could kill even The Black Widow.

For a few seconds, when Clint had kicked her feet out from under her and her palm hit the ground, Darcy’s inability to get outside of her own head evaporated, like clearing soap out of your eyes under a showerhead. She was suddenly aware, like static against her neck, that the archer was rounding back around her, to throw a kick at where she would be when she inevitable fell to the ground. Though she was looking nowhere at him.

Instead, she launched into a cartwheel, quickly moving into a spin to bring her left leg into a kick aimed at his kidney. Clint only barely managed to block the blow, taking the force of it against his forearm, but knocking him off balance, stumbling briefly.

The stood, staring at each other, both a little bit sweaty. The moment stretched.

“I’m worried,” was what Darcy finally said, answering his original question. She hesitated, before adding like the words were dragged from her lips, “And I need you on my side.”

“What are you worried about?” He asked, ignoring the second part since he knew in his blood, in his bones, that he would be on her side.

“Shield,” she said eventually, when she noticed that his body had finally gone completely loose, backing off from attacking now that she was answering his question.

“What about Shield?” He asked, still calm, using his shoulder sleeve to wipe off some of the sweat accumulating on his forehead. Darcy stared Clint in the eyes, willing him to understand what she was beginning to realize.

“Steve and Natasha aren’t here. No matter what bullshit Fury is spouting about needing them present to schmooze politicians to keep American tax dollars quietly flowing into Shield, something is going down. They could do that just as well from here,” she stated. Darcy stared at him, softly, searching for a clue on how to answer this question without putting him into an impossible position.

“Coulson has been different, acting erratically since he woke from the treatment that saved his life. Asking for access to corners of Shield that,” she breathed out, watching slowly as his eyes went blank again where they were open just a moment before. “Frankly, I’m not sure are safe to go delving.”

“And finally, after I found about the connection between Tony and me,” she said, trying to convey everything that has been building up within her since the moment she realized she hadn’t lost all of her blood family. How she was desperate to never lose more. “I hacked through Shield files about him. I found a lot of information. A lot, Clint. I’m talking next level stalker stuff. I found an intel report, dated weeks before Natasha was sent to keep on eye on him.”

She paused, to collect herself. She felt like she was going to buzz out of her skin, anger like fireflies at dusk. Lighting up little by little, until the whole field was dancing with them when the sun finally set.

“They knew about _my dad’s_ condition for weeks. It was like they were sure he was going to die. If they were worried about his health, why would Fury send Natasha, of all people, to keep an eye on his health?” She used the sarcastic air-quotes over the word health. Clint’s right hand started to twitch, a nervous habit that only ever slipped out when he was around people he trusted completely. She knew, in that moment, Clint had suspected a lot of this but _didn’t tell her_.

“Because Tony was vulnerable," Darcy said, no longer angry, just sad. Disappointed. “It would be the perfect time to illegally access those things he was keeping from the world while distracted with dying. Or confiscate outright when he did die. Repulsor technology. Arc reactor technology. Jarvis.”

 _The best of Tony,_ she would think.

“I didn’t know” Clint stated, hesitant and timid in a way he had never been around her. Looking lost with not knowing how to navigate this mine field and fighting off the urge to shut down defensively (that never helped with Darcy, he knew, it always made her dig harder). “Coulson and Fury both keep me out of any assignment that has anything to do with other superheroes except Natasha.”

When Darcy didn’t respond, Clint shrugged, “I root for the underdog. Gets in the way of objectivity, so says Fury. And Hill. And Coulson. And Natasha.”

Clint was reminded of himself, two years ago just before he met Darcy, high above the ground while it rained in a New Mexico dessert. He rooted for a big blond man, something noble and purposeful about him, despite the giant crashing through Shield operatives like dominos. Clint was disappointed for Thor, long before he knew him personally, since Clint was familiar with that bellow of sadness when Thor realized he was still not worthy of his hammer.

“You could have just said you had suspicions,” Darcy pointed out, heart heavy.

“I thought it was likely nothing. If it was really bad, Natasha and Coulson wouldn’t leave me dark. I believe that, 100%. I didn’t want to worry you, if it was nothing, I guess.” He added, scratching tentatively against the sweat drying on his neck.

“And, I’m not always,” he shrugged again, “good at this. Talking.”

A long moment stretched between them.

“I’ve talked to Tony, Pepper, Bruce and Jarvis about Shield’s not-so-benevolent interest in us and our company,” she said. She could feel the knowledge that it was _hers,_ that she belonged to the Stark legacy, grow in her like a weed.

“What are you asking from me, Darcy?” His voice soft, almost wondrous.

Before, with her fists and her feet, she had to struggle to stay out of his reach. He had to hold back to not deal more damage than she could take. Now, it was her turn to return the favor. Instead of fists, it was words and the threads of history that tied them together.

“I asked you to help me be a better fighter,” she said gesturing around at the gym like it would communicate more for her, despite knowing that it wouldn’t. “I knew you would ask me why I wanted to learn. I needed a way to talk to you about this.”

“You needed to see if I would fight with you or against you,” he said, voice soft. He flopped down gracelessly to the mat, back towards the sunlit windows, legs curled under each other in a meditative pose. He gestured at the ground, inviting the young girl to join him.

Pepper discreetly left the gym without being notice, satisfied with her observations, still rapidly speaking in Korean on the headset.

Darcy huffed out, slowly gaining a second (perhaps a third) wind. Mirroring his position, she sat close enough that if she unclenched her hands fisted on her knees, she could touch him. She was reassured when he nudged her knee gently with his own.

“Did you really need to ask?” He asked, as he raised his eyebrow in challenge, staring eye to eye. Shield has been his life, yes, for close to twenty years. More importantly, it had given him Coulson, Natasha and, indirectly, Darcy.

“No,” she said, slumping in her position, hunching her shoulders down like she was prepared to take a lashing. A smile grew on his lips, the first one since they started the whole ordeal.

“No, I didn’t,” she reiterated, subconsciously matched her breathing to his. He was guiding her, subtly, into a deep breathing exercise. “I just needed you to know that this is serious. I know this happened years ago, long before I knew Tony. I understand Natasha breaths secrets like air. I know that Coulson believes in Shield, would follow it to hell and back.”

“But you,” she swallowed over the lump in her throat. “After finding out he was my dad. I’m hurt you would keep anything from me, even a suspicion.”

He huffs out a breath, angry, but at himself not at Darcy. Perhaps, somewhat, at Shield.

“Everything is a fight, Darcy.” He ducked his head, mouth pursed into a hint of a smile, shy and apologetic. “And I’ll always fight _for you_.”

Darcy smiled, a watery smile, because she knew this was better than an apology. She knew he was not disavowing his loyalty to Natasha or Coulson. He was saying, in his own convoluted way, that he would fight to keep Darcy in his life. Even if that meant that meant a conflict with the others. That he would struggle to make it right between all of them, and wouldn’t give up until it was settled.

Her fists finally unclenched against her knees, relaxing.

He started to hum deep in his chest in a way he learned from some time spent in a temple in Nepal. He closed his eyes, turning his sight inward.

“You do realize this won’t get you out of training with me.” A clever smirk crossed his lips, “Now, more than ever.”

Darcy swung her hand instinctively. Clint laughed feeling the sting of her slap against his hand. “Alright, meditation time. It’ll help you with your situational awareness. Don’t think I didn’t notice how caught up you got in your own body, instead of remembering that there was somebody after you.”

He hummed a little louder, into a rich, deep reverberation that Darcy could feel in her finger tips and her toes while this close to him.

“Thanks, bro,” She murmured out, closing her eyes.

She moved a closed fist, slightly, bumping it gently into his own.


	4. Conversations (Heard and Unheard)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Darcy talk.
> 
> AKA There is plenty to be said, and even more not said, between Darcy and Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, right now, Steve and Darcy are not together. They both feel the attraction, and are heading in that direction. So, I'm trying to show how they are doing a sort of long-distance slow going relationship. I anticipate nothing serious is going to happen with them just yet.
> 
> I hope this wasn't too fillery, I felt like this needed to be written to lay down a couple some stuff to resolve some plot points. Yes, Darcy will be going to see Steve, and her trip to DC might have a conversation or two with a certain Russian we all know and love.
> 
> Warnings: Steve/Darcy flirting (a little twee but I find it adorable).

“So … did you get my letter?” came the voice from the screen immediately to Darcy’s left in her office.

Originally, Darcy’s office had the wall-to-wall window to her left side, video conference screen and door directly in front of her. Earlier that morning, she had moved the desk, back to the windows, because she kept getting distracted by things outside. The occasional passing of birds, clouds, and flying super heroes. Her mind kept flitting from thing to thing, and she thought this would help her.

She needed to give two things her full concentration: working on the secure data transfer from Shield and Jane’s Convergence readings. The second got most of her attention, since Jane was starting to freak out about not getting more done on it, and the first, Darcy, Jarvis and Tony had been working on solutions that wouldn’t ultimately collapse Shield’s systems into irreparable failure.

Steve’s face softened a touch, looking at Darcy in profile, as the girl propped up her legs on the desk. The young woman was making wild gestures at something outside of the vision of his video camera, and settling a keyboard on her lap. Darcy turned, just long enough for Steve to see the warm blue of her eyes, a crinkling at the corner of her eyes hidden behind the edges of her classes, as she smiled in greeting.

“Who even sends letters anymore?” Darcy said, turning back to the gesturing at a wall that Steve couldn’t see. She was now even happier that she made the furniture move in the office, because she wouldn't want anything she was working on shown through video conference. She personally wrote the encryption for video conference calls that Steve used, and helped Tony with the spy disrupter tech Steve had taken with him, but it was better safe than sorry.

Steve smiled. “Just me, apparently.”

“You also wrote it in Russian,” Darcy accused him, sullenly. She was frustrated because she had plateaued, she felt, with her written Russian somewhere at the 12th grad level. Steve's written Russian was impeccable.

“Natasha said you needed help with written Russian. She has also deemed my writing ‘passable.’” Steve continued on awkwardly.

“She’s still trying to set you up on dates, isn’t she?” Darcy teased him. Darcy found it terribly amusing.

“When I told her I was going to write you a letter to help, she stopped trying to push Nasim from Legal on me.” Steve wasn’t the least bit ashamed of doing something to get a brief reprieve from the Black Widow’s attention.

“Wimp,” Darcy called out, face focused on the digital files in front of her.

“I’m sorry. I realized I should have asked. Did you not want to get letters? Was the Russian not okay?” Steve asked, a little unsure.

“It being in Russian was fine.” She hid her smile, turning into her own shoulder like she was rubbing her nose, satisfied at the thoughtfulness of Steve's gesture. Darcy tried to not let herself be surprised by both the thoughtfulness of Natasha’s likely manipulation in getting Steve to help her. “I’m glad you like your apartment, at the least.” She was deliberately trying to keep the conversation to information she believed Shield likely already knew.

Steve shrugged, used to doing his duty no matter how unpleasant. “I always loved the Lincoln Memorial,” the soldier added, voice severe.

“You are running there every day? I mean, are you all right when you? You know, by the,” she gestured, awkward and unsure about how to phrase it, “World War II Memorial?”

“I’m glad,” he said, words lingering, uncertain. He was thankfully that she was concerned enough to ask. “It’s good that people remember it. Try not to make the same mistakes.”

“That’s mighty optimistic but you always seem to pull that off rather well, Mr. America.” Darcy teased in that way that sounded like teasing, but was evident that it was seriously meant.

“Well, as you have pointed out to me many times, since I’m ‘Captain Freaking America’ I can get away with anything. If DC gets to be too much, I’ll just run away. Wouldn’t be the first time I disobeyed orders and got a commendation instead of reprimand.” Steve liked to remind people that while _Captain America_ might symbolize apple pie, righteousness, and justice, Steve Rogers was more a ‘punk’ through and through. Bucky would be proud.

Darcy laughed, a high pitched sound that was just one loud exclamation of ‘Ha!’ It lightened the mood, causing Steve to smile at the brunette woman.

“Anyway, to shift gears back to the letter thing. You _have_ heard of email, right?” Darcy plowed ahead, ignoring the awkwardness like it never existed.

“Gee-golly, Miss. I ne’er hear’ of dat newfangled thing where ya can see sumbody's face like they was there in real time,” Steve drawled out, rolling his eyes at yet another ‘old man doesn’t know technology’ joke.

“Just like magic, Captain Sassy Pants.” Darcy responded in sarcastic wonder. “Does everyone know you were this sassy? People should know you are this sassy.”

“Gosh, you sound just like Howard when you say things like that.” Steve added, fond memories of the thin mustached man who learned to take his time to explain things to Steve, in order to avoid mishaps like the whole _fondue_ incident.

“You take that back,” Darcy chuckled, pointing at him accusingly without looking in his direction.

He lifted his hands in surrender. “I take it back. You sound just like _Tony_ when you say things like that.”

She made a rude gesture with her hand. She didn't respond, hesitant to say anything out loud that might accidentally imply her relationship to Tony.

“You still haven’t answered my question, _Ms_. Lewis?” Steve, unaware, moved on. H stressed the _“Ms.”_ sharply. He had started calling her Darcy long ago, and he knew it irked her when he reverted back to Ms. Lewis. “Did you not want to get letters?”

“You didn’t mention letter writing is going to be a thing the last time we spoke?” Darcy teased, refusing to answer his question. She wiggled in her chair, to get her propped legs on her desk in a more comfortable position.

“You didn’t tell me video conference every couple of days was going to be a thing. You just did it,” Steve pointed out, scrubbing his head with a fluffy white towel to get the last of the moisture from his shower, wearing one of the crisp, white tank tops he had started to prefer. He had only recently finished from a morning check in with potential members for a new, elite team. Putting over 20 agents through their paces, before he mulled over his decision to narrow it down to 10 by that evening.

Darcy discreetly watched the motion from the corner of her eye.

“Well, you’re the one that called me this time,” Darcy pointed out. Making a sweeping gesture around her, “Even though you knew I’d be working.”

“Should I leave you to it?” Steve asked, eyebrow raised, daring. “It isn’t like you don’t interrupt me at random times with your phone calls.”

“All of which are after dark.” Darcy added, petulantly. “Say it with me ‘after dark.’ That thing, where the sun sets beyond the horizon.”

“You had the video call routed to my phone, while I was in a middle of a firefight.” He pointed out smugly, “And you waited on the line until everything was done.”

“You super soldier, me normal girl,” she imitated Tarzan. “You could have held a conversation with me and subdued that off-shoot of 10 Rings like it was nothing.”

“You really should stop hacking to get so much classified information about mine and Natasha’s missions.” He pointed out, knowing it was a lost cause to stop the woman from getting her hands on information about 'her favoritest people.' Darcy had used Clint to get that info but she wasn't going to say that out loud. “Plus, you’ve been doing work without pause since you got on this call.”

Darcy’s hands momentarily froze in the air, from where she was gesturing through data feeds, pulling up and collating reports for Jane. She recovered quickly, returning to typing furiously at the keyboard on her lap.

“A normal girl, you’re not, ma’am,” he added, perfect teeth smile and all Boy-Next-Door charm that he had perfected in his time in from of cameras in the 40’s. “A genius, most definitely.”

“Are you complementing me, Soldier Boy?” Darcy asked coyly, turning her head knowing the fall of hair over her shoulder would frame her face nicely. She might have even practiced this in the mirror some mornings.

Steve bit out a sarcastic salute, “Sir, no, sir.”

Darcy snorted, “Yes, I liked getting a letter. Please feel free to send more, but I will only respond via email or video call. Just remember the Stark security protocols I reminded you about.” She tried hard not to put too much emphasis on the last sentence.

She turned her attention back to Steve, staring into his sharp blue eyes. “Also, did you know you have a bit of shaving cream,” she gestured to a spot just under her right jaw, “right there.”

Steve rubbed at his neck with a towel, feeling the threat of a blush that he suppressed. “Thanks.”

He was hoping she wouldn’t realize he had shaved and showered specifically for this phone call, wanting to make a good impression. He had left his hair wet and not combed because he didn’t want to look like he was trying _too_ hard. Steve had been spending far too much time with Natasha, he would think to himself later when he realized what he was doing.

“I really did like getting a letter. You know, if you needed to be sure,” she said, turning back to the other set of screens. Wondering if Steve would notice a blush on her face.

“It wasn’t too cheesy?” He said, stumbling over the expression, having only just learned of it from Natasha.

“Nope,” she did that popping noise she tended to add to words ended with ‘p’ sounds. “Do you want me to write a letter back? Because, I’ll tell you now, my handwriting is shit.”

“No, I’m good with emails. I just like writing letters.” A somber look crossed his face. “Reminds me of the letters I’d write to Bucky, before I finally made it to the front lines with him. It’s familiar.”

“That makes sense,” Darcy assured him, throwing him a soft smile quickly over her shoulder. Acknowledging the sorrow still constant to Steve’s life, but not making a big deal of it. The man appreciated it.

“Did you really want to name your new team STRIKE?” She asked, trying to show him that she had read the letter and paid attention.

“Well, Special Tactical Reserve for International Key Emergencies. And it _is a_ strike team,” Steve defended with a pout.

“Ha … STRIKE Strike Team Strikes Again. So much possibility for lameness.”

“No lamer than ‘The Avengers’ or ‘Strike Team: Delta’,” Steve added, huffy.

“Okay, fair point,” Darcy acknowledged. She turned her head to the side, scrunching up her nose a bit, trying to make sense of some of the readings on her screen. Steve thought it looked adorable. “You okay with getting saddled with STRIKE? You sounded pretty, I don’t know, factual about it?”

Steve shrugged. “Senator Stern and a few other Republicans on the funding committee made an Anti-Terrorism Unit a stipulation for continued funding.”

“Okay, Mr. Synopsis, I knew that. But you didn’t want you and Natasha to have to be the ones to lead it?” She asked, actually somewhat angry (not at Steve) but hiding it. Darcy brought her legs down off the desk, shaking them out because she was losing circulation, before resting them firmly on the floor.

Steve, sitting on the floor in front of his couch in his DC apartment looking where his laptop was set up on the table, grabbed a sketchpad and some charcoals from the underside of the table. Sketching soothed him when he was agitated, and the thought of the STRIKE team was agitating.

Plus, the early afternoon sun made Darcy’s hair a riot of browns, casting shadows along her face, emphasizing the softness of her lips and severity of her eyes. He started sketching her outline, silently.

“I couldn't really get out of it. From what Natasha explained, this is the World Security Council's payback for Director Fury launching the Avengers Initiative without proper authorization.” Steve shrugged, looking down at his sketchpad as he carefully, always so carefully, formed the picture. He still had a lifetime of habits where art supplies were few and far between, always expensive, needing to be diligent with every stroke in order to ensure the work came to life the way he pictured it in his head.

“You’d think Fury would recognize you have better things to do with your time.” Her voice hid most of her anger, but Steve picked up on the undertones of it. His eyes narrowed in suspicion, recognizing a disproportion reaction, however subtle, when he saw one.

“As soon as I figure out why Fury went along with it, I’ll let you know,” Steve responded, face completely serious.

He got a wide-eyed, assessing look from Darcy at his response. When she found whatever it is she was looking for from Steve, she grinned, gratitude painting her face. “Thanks Steve.”

Steve paused between breaths, wondering if he should press his luck and ask after some of the suspicious behavior he had been noticing recently. He had been noticing, over the last week or so, a subtle shift in the conversations between them. Nothing drastic, little details, important but small, missing from her descriptions of the things she had been up to.

He asked, vaguely, allowing her the freedom to answer the question however she wished. “Everything okay, Darcy?”

The way he said Darcy, full of implication and promise, was the same way he had spoken to her in the dark of a cab weeks ago at the end of a Valentine’s Day night. She shivered at it, but refused to show it. “Nothing to be worried about, Stevie-boy.”

Steve nodded, contemplatively. “Good,” he said, simply.

“Anyway, how long do you think until you’re back in the Big Apple?” Darcy asked, voice disinterested. She was anything but disinterested.

“Why? You got big plans, doll?” Steve said, slipping into a voice more natural to him. He only used when he let his guard down. He hadn’t said doll since long before he got shipped to DC.

“That is yet to be seen, Mr. Red White and Blue,” Darcy hummed out, adding threads of insinuation into her voice. “I think I could be persuaded to have plans.”

Steve hunched over his slowly forming charcoal drawing, trying not to smudge anything on himself, still focused on the applying some shading detail to make Darcy’s form come into perspective. “Just long enough for Natasha and I to train them up and run a few test missions. To prove it works.”

“Then do you need something to motivate you to work them _extra hard_?” She was really didn’t want to be that person at this moment. _Not that there was anything wrong with that person. But_ c _ome on Darcy, he’s a national icon not a Tindr hookup,_  she would think to herself. Unfortunately, Darcy did not often heed her own advice.

Steve, having caught on because there was not a drop of subtly in the last statement, refused to blush. He always seemed to end up blushing, often several times, every conversation he had with the bombshell. “Ummm … I think that motivation was there already.”

 _Gosh, that was dumb_ , he would think to himself, smudging some charcoal along his hairline as he scratched awkwardly near his ear.

Darcy laughed, freely. She looked to her side to see his reaction, Darcy noticed he wasn’t blushing at all. Whenever she noticed him suppress or fight off an embarrassed response, some part of her took this as a dare to try harder. It was, she would admit to herself, not a healthy response. Still, before the summer came, Darcy was sure she would get him to full-body blush.

“Tell me about what you are working on Darcy,” Steve stated, feigning calm. Hoping to cut Darcy off before she pushed farther.

“Just some stuff for Jane,” Darcy shrugged, returning to giving most of her attention on the work before her.

The features on Steve’s sketchpad were coming to life. The eyes were the last major feature left before finishing touches, but the blond man was not sure how he was going to tackle that feature. He, to his great frustration, had trouble with eyes.

He looked up at his screen, staring intensely at the focused but remote look on Darcy’s face as she worked. He decided to respond, “No really, tell me what you’re working on. I like hearing about it. Please.”

It was Darcy’s turn to blush, but she hid it behind the spill of her hair. She coughed, before adding, “So, Jane has been taking readings about some spatial phenomenon the Asgardians call the Convergence. Early reading show disturbances in space-time but no true portals have formed yet. I’m working on the math now to do some projections for when we might see true inter-planetary portal formation.”

Steve smiled, watching the light in her eyes emerge was a sight to behold. He soaked it in, letting it flow from his eyes, through his chest, out through his fingertips.

“Why math?” He asked, off-handedly, eyes intensely focused on his nearly complete sketch.

“What do you mean?” Darcy asked, still 95% focused on the work before her.

“Every time you talk about pitching in on Jane, Bruce or Tony’s work, it’s almost always to help them with the math.” He pointed out, eyes moving back and forth to the screen to watch the young woman work.

“Oh,” She lets out a dismissive snort. “Math is my jam, yo.” She would be embarrassed with her own idioms sometimes, but that was just the way she was. “It’s what makes me hella awesome with computers.”

Her eyes lit up, her hands still typing away, she hit a tangent of thought and ran with it, not really addressing Steve’s question. “You should see some of Bruce’s proofs. Like, man understands physics like ‘whoa’ but the math, man, the math.” Steve nodded along, watching her eyes shine as she explained that Tony was an engineer, first and foremost, and Jane was the closest to Darcy’s raw mathematics ability.

“You should try to watch Jane and Tony get drunk and try to solve Millennium Prize Problems. Hilarious!”

Steve listened with half an ear as she went off on tangents, about mathematics and not. He was totally focused on moving quickly to fill in the shade, the light, the life of the subject into his sketch. His hands were getting messy as he smudged carefully, using fingertip and edges of palm. Darcy had been going on for several minutes completely unaware that she was rambling.

“I mean, Fields Metal, right? Tony doesn’t have one of those. I’ll probably wait until Tony pitches a fit and sends me to get a Ph.D. from MIT but probably not before then. Perhaps I'll go to CIT to spite him. Also, I’ve been thinking about taking a stab at the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. You know, it is out of left field for most of what Team SCIENCE! does, that it’d be good to differentiate myself from their work a little bit. Make a name for myself kind of thing, you know?. Plus, I _have_ been brushing up on my physics when I started interning with Jane.”

He looked at the final touches he put on the eyes, the curve of cheek and smile, making sure he got everything just right.

“I still haven’t told Jane that I hacked her application system and made sure I was the only applicant. I like _really_ needed those six credits, and the other internships or classes maxed out at four or five. A lot of kids were like, scarily into her, even though she was a bit of a crackpot in the astrophysics world. There was one kid, probably had a major boner for Jane, who also seemed to worship Jane’s dad’s research. I guess the name Foster means a lot to some people.”

“Hey Darcy,” Steve interrupted gently, hoping to get in between thoughts so as not to derail the girl completely. He debated, for a moment, against showing her the picture. But, he knew he would feel bad for drawing her without her permission during their talk.

“Yeah, Stevie-boy?” Darcy responded, automatically.

“Look,” he said, shyly, and ducking his head slightly away from the screen, while he held up the sketch towards his laptop.

Darcy’s breath froze in her chest. She saw her outline, dark shadows that made her lips look full, though most of her mouth was hidden. Cheekbones pronounced, almost graceful. Hair wild, not in one of her characteristic I’m-working-leave-me-alone ponytails. Her eyes, even from there, looked like they were dancing and burning at once.

“Steve,” she exhaled.

The sound caused the older man’s breath to catch in his throat. “Yeah, Darcy.”

He held his breath, afraid. Darcy held her breath, too, very much in awe.

“Do you think Jane would like some company to DC for her conference in a few weeks?” Darcy asked, smile hopeful.

A grin split his face, the corner of his smile only just apparent around the edges of the sketchpad he was holding up.

“I’m sure she would like that a lot, Darcy,” he said. He finally blushed.


	5. Two Down, One To Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha and Darcy Chat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update folks, the holidays got involved and my writing every other day schedule got wonky. I don't know a lick of Russian, so I didn't even try doing google translate. I just italicized and tried to make it clear what is in Russian and what isn't. Let your imagination do the rest.
> 
> Natasha is not perfect she can miss things, but to me the major reason she didn't know more about what was going on in Shield is because she wasn't really allowed to. Conspirators inside of Shield would be too afraid of her finding out, so she mostly got stuck with people who were definitely good guys. In other words, just Strike team delta and Fury.
> 
> Also, headcanon: Fury comes off as cold and calculating but that story about his grandfather and the bag of money with a gun stuck with me. I like to think Fury actually loves people. Like, walks old women across side walks. Dotes on babies and lets little kids play with his eye patch. He is the BAMF he is not because he is stone cold, but because he isn't. He plays the stone cold spy because that's what people expect to see.
> 
> Warnings: Being spied on; f/f flirting as distraction; is WidowShock my brotp? No, but damn close

“WHY DID I AGREE TO THIS?” Darcy shouted to be heard over the rush of air.

In the back of her mind, she recognized that the speed that Thor was propelling through the air, estimated travel time from lift off to landing from DC to NYC, was less than 2.5 minutes. That clocked their speed over 5,000 miles per hour. The air resistance alone would normally leave the young girl a smear on the wall.

Instead of focusing on this morbid fact, Darcy was occupying her mind wondering why it felt like they were only moving on a particularly fast motor cycle. Her first thought was that Thor was exuding some instinctual magic that dampened the drag. Darcy dismissed this, because she figured his alien physique was likely equipped to handle to force of such fast travel, so it would make no sense that Thor’s innate magic would compensate.

Knowing what she knew of Thor’s abilities, the hypothesis she most wanted to test out was this: Mjölnir bent space-time like Warp Engines in Star Trek. Instead of moving particularly fast, space was actually folding in front of them, hastening their travel. Honestly, this made the most sense, especially considering the hammer’s ability to not be lifted by anyone but Thor. She ran a few tests, like having Thor leave his hammer on an elevator. The hammer moved with the elevator. So, it couldn’t be Mjolnir’s weight, because she knew it didn’t break the common room tables when Thor constantly left the hammer there when he made midnight pop-tart runs.

“Lady Darcy, do you not enjoy the wonderful view of Midgard?” Thor boomed out, laughing loud enough to be heard over the rush of air. The women in his life so rarely allowed him to sweep them off their feet, literally, to take them flying. He enjoyed every minute of it.

“This still beats airplanes, buddy.” She shouted, adjusting her grip around Thor’s neck. With her backpack on her back, just enough clothes and gadgets to last her for the weekend, she had to go riding piggy-back style..

“My Beloved Jane has said as much, herself. She will have to brave the aero-plane to London herself!” Mostly, Thor loved the snacks and the attention. Still, Jane mostly managed to convince the blond god to play Mjolnir Express.

“Are you sure you have to go back to Asgard right now?” Darcy lent closer to his ear so she wouldn’t have to shout as hard. Thor was going to make two further trips this day, one to go bring Jane to DC for her Women in Astrophysics Conferences and again to pick up Jane’s luggage. Jane was heading directly to London after the conference. Their readings on the Convergence suggested that most of the activity was localized to that city, so Jane will be stationed at Stark UK for the foreseeable future.

“Aye Shield Sister!” Thor nodded, gravely. “The Queen Mother has summoned me.”

When Darcy opened her mouth to ask another question, Thor cut her off quickly. “We shall be landing soon, Friend Darcy. Hold tight!” Thor gripped Mjolnir more firmly, angling his body to absorb the shock of the landing, securing Darcy’s grip around him with his free hand.

They landed by the river just a ways away from the JFK Center for the Performing Arts. Darcy, barely jostled, jumped off of Thor’s back with a flourish. She would have done a back flip, but she hadn’t practiced such a move with Thor as she had with Clint in recent days.

She checked her watch, “Okay, the car taking us to the hotel isn’t going to arrive for another 20 minutes, big guy.” Darcy stated, lightly swatting Thor’s massive bicep.

“Aye, plenty of time then,” Thor said, starting to swing his hammer.

“Hold on, buddy.” Darcy gestured him to slow down. “I still meant to ask before you go flying out. What’s up with your mom calling you back?” Darcy stood, hands on hips, indicating she did not want him to leave without answering her question.

Thor’s face was a mixture of amusement and solemnity, as he crossed his arms to evaluate the young woman before him. “Have I mentioned of late, my respect for your growth as a Warrior, Lady Darcy? You have learned to strike quite the formidable pose.”

Darcy couldn’t help be smile at the genuine sincerity that came to Thor like breathing, despite knowing she was being teased. “In a large part, due to your efforts, Prince Thor,” she added, teasing in turn.

“Aye, you show much promise with The Dance,” Thor nodded, “Lady Sif and Queen Frigga would be most pleased with this.” The Dance was not a discipline so much as a style that was popular amongst the female warriors of Asgard. Thor was by no means a master but he was more than adequate a teacher for Darcy after serving as Lady Sif’s practice target for neigh on 700 years.

“Still not answering my question, big guy.” Darcy added, stepping into Thor’s space to wrap her arms around him in a bruising (for her) hug.

“I have no answer to give, Lady Darcy. I fear, that lies at the heart of my worries since the All-Mother sent her request in dream this past night. It does not bode well that word came from such a method. It means things are stirring that the All-Mother has _seen_ but may not speak of directly for fear of the Norns.”

Thor, ever so gently, tightened Darcy into a hug. “Enough of this worry, Darcy. Tis a time to visit friends and enjoy a respite. I shall return from Asgard at the soonest opportunity. I shall fly you to this Venice of which you requested, and we shall have your gelato.” Thor launched into the air to return to New York, moving even faster than the incoming flight Darcy noticed.

Darcy was waiting on a path that would lead directly to the opera house, enjoying the crisp Thursday afternoon sun. It was a beautiful day.

Darcy was staring out at the Potomac, fingers ghosting along her two coat pockets from the outside. Inside each pocket was a flash drive. Darcy was contemplating whether or not they were going to be necessary in the coming weekend.

The sound of the highway leading over the river, onto the Teddy Roosevelt Island, suffused the cool March day. Below that sound, just on the edge of Darcy’s hearing, she heard the whisper click-clack of heels on concrete.

The young woman, reached up to adjust the bright purple knit cap that she had taken out of her coat the moment she landed. Darcy turned to the right, immediately making eye contact with Natasha.

The Russian woman was in a sleek black pants suit, the top was more a stylized vest than an actual sports coat, letting the warm undertones of yellow stand out on the blouse. Natasha’s face, as always around her friends, was cool with a hint of a smirk on her lips.

Darcy came to DC not knowing if she was going to find Natasha there, but planned for the occurrence anyway. She thought about it, of course. If right now was the time to confront, to discuss, to accuse. If it was worth it to try to deflect until she was on home turf or lay all the cards on the table at once and see what happens.

It came as a relief to Darcy that her only impulse was to hug Natasha. She decided to trust that instinct.

“Permission to hug, ma’am,” Darcy asked, opening her arms wide.

Natasha smiled one of her soft smiles, the ones that looked like smirks but lost most of their hard edges, and approached Darcy on silent feet. She would not have been detected if she did not want to. It amused the assassin that Darcy always asked permission to touch her, even if it would be almost impossible for Natasha to be touched without her permission. The Russian understood the motivation anyway.

“Welcome to DC, lapochka,” Natasha smoothly added, encircling the slightly shorter woman into a hug. The redhead had not seen most of the Avengers for several weeks, and the months prior to that had her on so many missions she was hardly around anyway.

“Not that I’m not happy to see you, but what brings you for taxi duty?” Darcy asked, pulling away from the redhead after the contact. Natasha smelled like lilies and gunpowder.

“Human Traffickers in East Europe, specializing in under 18.” Natasha lifted her eyes towards the sun, glinting like daggers made of ice in the afternoon light. “When Steve told me you were in DC for the weekend, I found the motivation to … _expedite_ the dismantling process.”

“Wow … That sucks.” Darcy nodded. Even after almost two years wrapped up with Shield, one with the Avengers, she still had not learned if there was a right thing to say when you heard things like this. Taking her queues that she learned with Clint, she acknowledged and moved on. It had been worked for her so far.

She smiled at the Russian hopefully, switching to Russian, “ _Can you stay the whole weekend?_ ”

“ _Ahh … you should make the o more distinct if you are trying to sound Northern. And no, tonight and tomorrow only. I have checked with Steven, he said you only have plans for tomorrow and Thursday_.” Natasha emphasized the sounds she meant.

Darcy switched back to English, making sure she would be understood, “Great, then we can do dinner tonight!”

“I already have just the place in mind, lapochka.” Natasha’s smirk was wicked, promising the kind of shenanigans that only the Russian could deliver. The last time Darcy and Natasha had a girl’s night, just the two of them, they ended up at a bar of a man with diamond hard skin. They took turns throwing knives at him through the course of the night. It was a riot.

-

Natasha didn’t have habits, she had conditioning. Personality traits so firmly built into her that it didn’t even matter if they were natural or placed there by the Red Room. When she came kicking in screaming into the light, blood on her hands and a hospital burning at her back, she embraced those parts of herself that she knew would keep her alive.

The primary one: never trust that you know everything. The moment you believed that, you were dead. Almost all of her behavior sprang from this truth like her paranoia, her secret keeping, her analyzing everything about anyone that entered her life, down to the littlest detail.

Therefore, she knew things were brewing. She knew, as much as it is possible to know anything about Fury, that the Director was orchestrating something. What, she was not quite sure.

Dressed in a Red Tux Jumpsuit, sleek red that hugged her curves but framed the solidity of her arms and legs, she entered the restaurant for dinner with Darcy. Natasha's hands, hidden underneath her white coat, might have been fisted in trepidation.

The assassin had felt the subtle change of currents inside the Avengers when she and Steve were moved to DC. More importantly, she watched the mark of charcoal grow on Steve’s finger tips. Steve might not know it, but his choice of medium reveals far much more about his mental state than he knew. Water colors for contemplation. Oils for indulgence and relaxation. Charcoal for passion or worry. His fingers tips were positively tar-like these last weeks.

She walked into the dinner, anticipating nothing but expecting everything. Even the fact that Darcy was 15 minutes early, and by the looks of the shape of her purse and the way the brunette had angled her body, had deployed some of the anti-surveillance Stark Tech. Which was fine, since Natasha had staked out this place herself weeks ago to know which would be the best table to not be observed.

Darcy was at the table that Natasha had chosen for thee night, in a tight black dress with bright blue accents at the bosom and hips. Natasha had gotten that dress for her. It was another of the Stark Bullet Proof dresses they’ve had made and installed into Darcy’s public appearance wardrobe. Natasha would soon know if it was a show of gratitude or a test of loyalty, wearing that dress.

Natasha stalked to Darcy’s table with a casual air, walking straight up to the brunette. The Widow with a natural grace, assessed every table, every face for a hint of threat.

When she reached the table, she bent down in a way she knew would emphasize her form from both forward and behind. Casually brushing Darcy’s hair away from the other woman’s face, she leaned in to give her an artful kiss on the cheek hello. It was angled so that the most likely suspects for the alphabet agencies present would think they had touched lips. One man at the bar looking like he was waiting for his female escort to arrive, the other a woman in the back right corner who looked like a divorced police detective waiting for her Tindr date.

“Good evening, Darce,” Natasha greets with a warm smile, all sharp edges carefully tucked away. “How are you?”

Natasha never called Darcy ‘Darce.’ Darcy throws Natasha a winning smile, “Hello, Nat.” Darcy played along. “It is all good in the neighborhood. All set up in the hotel suite with Jane for the conference. What about yourself?”

“I’m just glad that I have the weekend to see you,” Natasha’s voice dropped into pure whiskey. It amused her that she, even despite their friendship, could make Darcy shiver that way. “I see working with Stark has been treating you well. Not too bored yet.” _I know you want to talk about Tony, but we’re being watched_ , was clearly expressed through Natasha’s eyes.

Darcy pulls out her Stark phone, rolling her eyes very dramatically. “Thanks for reminding me. I should turn off my cell phone before he calls with another fire I need to put out.” She discreetly hit the power button three times, which alerted Jarvis to monitor their surroundings and report to Darcy the location of anyone using typical spy communication devices. When the screen flashed blank deceptively, she set it on the table.

Natasha acknowledged the motion with a nod. Natasha leaned forward, making the gesture intimate, when the server finally moved in front of the table. She leaned to Darcy’s side, tilting her head upward to the server, analyzing him quickly and dismissing him. She let the server talk about the day’s specials.

With the server on one side, her hair covering her face from the other, she was not worried of being overheard or having her lips read. Weaving an image of a shy foreign girl with an American girlfriend for the waiter, she switched back to Russian. _“If you want to have this conversation privately, we’re going to have to ditch our trail_ ,” she smiled prettily, ducking her head coyly.

Darcy smiled, leaning gently on the table with her right elbow, bracketing her phone discreetly to hide it from sight. She covered the motion by playing gently with her hair, like she was flirting, hair covering the other side of her face as Natasha’s had done. “Give me a second, I just need to translate for my … friend here.” The server nodded, Darcy looks back to Natasha, smile playful but eyes dark. Darcy added, “ _Tap the screen and watch it. It’ll tell you the location, relative to us, of any signals being used by agents monitoring us.”_

Darcy looked up at the server suddenly, as Natasha reached out a hand, almost like she was caressing Darcy’s elbow on the table. “We’ll have the prix fixe menu and the bottle of merlot, if you would. But please make sure there is no shell fish.” Darcy glances again at Natasha, “ _You so owe me big for this, you realize. I was really in the mood for French_.”

The screen flashed, not bright enough to distract, just grey text appearing, alerting them to two constant incoming and outgoing signals in the restaurant and their proximate locations. Natasha smiled a wicked smile, “ _The navy suit with the orange tie at the bar, and grey-blue dress in the back corner. I’ll let you choose who you distract.”_

Darcy glanced back up to the server. “Yeah, definitely no shell fish. But you said there were dessert alternatives for the prix fixe? Could you tell us now? I’d rather not have to interrupt my conversation with my friend to translate once more.”

The server nodded, explaining the intricacies of their pastry chef that evening.

When he finished, Darcy turned back to Natasha, tilting her head but propping it up on her chin. Darcy, trying to look the image of an enraptured young woman, said “ _I looked up the schematic for the building. A major power line is just off the women’s bathroom. Pretend to go there for a quickie, I’ll knock it out in like 5 seconds, and we blow this joint?”_

Natasha nodded, licking her lips subtly, letting the server be enraptured by her for just a moment. “Yes, I’d like that,” she added in a heavy Russian accent, voice like honey.

Fifteen minutes later, the power to the restaurant and several buildings nearby will experience power failure that would be attributed to a faulty breaker in that restaurant.

-

They were sitting on the roof of the International Spy Museum (“They also have lax security and won't expect the irony,” explained Natasha), eating carry-out Five Guys burgers and eating Cajun fries directly from the bag, not a single worry about ruining their dresses.

“Why is it always with you?” Darcy gestured around a handful of fries, shoved quickly into her mouth before the cool night stole their warmth.

“Perhaps, you are the bad luck charm, Darcy Lewis,” Natasha teased, snatching a little plastic cup of ketchup from the brunette. She dipped her burger into the ketchup, slathering it.

“Also, not going to lie. I’m going to enjoy the fact that people are going to think we’re boning. Ups my street cred.”

Natasha quickly stole the large diet coke settled between them, taking a large gulp. “You have street cred enough, I would think. Avengers, several thwarted kidnappings, evacuating Puente Antiguo. You weren’t even trained for most of that.”

Darcy laughed. Natasha like making Darcy laugh. Darcy was one of the few people in the Avengers and Friends, Natasha thought sometimes, who was capable of pure joy.

“Is this going to,” Darcy said after she regained her breath and gesturing around herself with a fry, “get either of us in trouble?”

Natasha shook her head as she took a huge, unladylike bite of her double bacon burger. “No, they will expect this. They are likely FBI, perhaps NSA. The World Security Council would not dare command Shield agents right now.”

“Why is that?” Darcy asked, in genuine curiosity. Natasha and Coulson had been dealing with the WSC for the Avengers and Shield for as long as she could remember. This was the first time she was hearing any tension in that arena.

“It has much to do with the conversation you actually wish to have, lapochka. About loyalty and friendship,” Natasha said, eyes distant, staring at the hazy Washington DC sky, not needing her coat to stay warm but luxuriating, privately, at the comfort of it.

Darcy’s cheeks, already slightly pinked from the cold, went red. She shrugged, “I haven’t been trying to hide it or anything. That there was something I needed to talk to you about. I was just working my way up to starting.”

“I know that, Darcy,” Natasha reassured. Darcy could not have hidden it fully if she tried, but it was instinct to hide wounds, to cover up awkwardness. That Darcy did not do so went a long way in Natasha’s book. “I was just giving you the opportunity to start the conversation.”

“Sometimes, I wish you could actually read minds. Make this thing easier,” Darcy said, taking the time to savor her single bacon cheeseburger with all the fixings.

“No, that would be a crutch, I think. I think it is likely harder to train your body not to betray your mind.” Natasha permitted these moments of philosophy to very few. She gave Darcy the time, watching it build up before her like a castle, to gather her courage.

“I went deep into Shield servers, improving the data mining program I told you about. Deep enough to find things that not even Tony knew was there. Stuff that pointed towards Tony, if not all of the Avengers, being heavily surveilled by Shield.” Darcy admitted through cold lips, colder than they should be given the night.

“Ahhh … And you wished to know if I was sent to monitor, kill or steal from Tony during his palladium poisoning.” With that, Natasha laid back on the cold concrete, watching the sky with no stars. She was not surprised that this would come back around. She was never surprised when things came back around.

Darcy watched Natasha, wondering if she was stepping in a field of mines but not sure if there was any way to know until she had either cleared the field or been blown to bits.

“The amount of data is staggering, almost a lifetime’s worth of stuff on Tony, perhaps even actual schematics and tech secrets. Right now, we can’t do much with the data until we can transfer it to our servers. One report that stood out suggested that an operative would be sent to monitor Tony but their intention was to ensure Iron Man technology went into Shield’s hands.”

Darcy wouldn’t ask outright. She couldn’t. Not with Natasha, not with what that would mean to a woman who spent her whole life trained to be a weapon only to grow into something constantly feared or coveted.

“Let me tell you something about the Black Widow first, Darcy.” Natasha continued to nibble on fries, staring up at the sky. Darcy relaxed, laying down parallel but facing the opposite direction of Natasha. “When the Black Widow joined Shield, the World Security Council wanted her dead. Nicholas Fury, in his capacity as Director, invoked the executive privileges of his position that allowed him to take on assets for the good of Shield even against the wishes of the Council. They could not gainsay this invocation without seriously undermining Fury’s office, which everyone knew would jeopardize Shield’s reputation with key world governments that Fury has strong ties to.”

“In return, Fury had to make concessions. Oversight of certain US Military science projects given to General Ross. Allow Belarus to host the European Shield Armory.”

Darcy deliberately matched her breathing to Natasha’s, allowed the calm of the other woman to sooth her.

“In the end, the Black Widow was allowed to join, but she was kept separate from almost all of Shield. She was determined to be both too valuable and too dangerous to be a routine part of the operations of the organization. Yes, she would be Level 8 and routinely conduct operations far above that Level. Yes, she worked with almost everyone that was important inside of Shield.”

“But, only Nick Fury gave missions to the Black Widow, Philip Coulson if Nick Fury was not available. And the Black Widows was never permitted to stay any one place long enough to call it home.” In Natasha’s mind, there was a very clear distinction between assigning a mission and giving an order. She accepted orders from Captain America in the field, but she would not go topple a regime simply because he told her to. Nick Fury gave her the missions. Like ‘Go be a goddam superhero’ and ‘Save the goddam world by killing this man, you Russian punk.’ The difference between the two meant everything.

Her voice was soft, like reading from a story book to a child. “The only exception was Strike Team: Delta. Though, that was the Widow’s only demand when she signed up. The assassin danced away from the arrows of a blond-haired boy on one of his first missions and was spared from death by that boy when he became a man. She refused to be kept from that.”

What Natasha did not say was that she was the catalyst for Clint’s isolation within Shield. Her recruitment, his willingness to believe in heroes, was what made him a fantastic Avenger but made him a terrible agent. After Loki and the Scepter, he was as isolated in Shield as she had always been. She became one of his only friends, the only one who gossiped, relaxed, or cared for him. Just as he always was for her.

Darcy contemplated extending a hand, patting a leg, for comfort. She decided against it. Nothing she had ever seen had let her know that Natasha was one to be comforted by touch. Changing her mind again after Darcy sat in contemplation for a long moment, she asked, “I’m going to pat your leg okay?”

“Do what you must, lapochka.” There was hints of amusement in Natasha’s voice, she continued on wile Darcy unnecessarily tried to sooth something that needed no comfort. “It is a constant battle between Director Fury and the WSC. Right now, he has the upper hand. One slip that the WSC ordered a nuclear launch on a civilian center, the current board will be disposed by their respective governments. Ordering myself and Rogers here is merely a petty display of force. Fury is weeding through Shield to take out the WSC loyalists, taking the liberty of destroying items too dangerous to be kept in human hands that the WSC would otherwise demand be kept. Vetoing any directives that command the theft of technology from dying men, where Fury would normally be overruled by the Council as a matter of ‘international security.’”

Natasha took a deep breath, no discomfort marring her words. If she were a different woman, perhaps it would have been otherwise.

“Neither Fury nor Coulson can lie to the Widow, making her dangerous to them. But, they can hide things from her, if they try hard enough. Especially Fury. Fury, no matter how brash or strange he appears to be, is the spy’s spy. He confuses the Widow. Not because he is cold and calculating. The opposite, in fact. Fury loves people and cares for his agents. Even the Black Widow. He would ride into hell and fight the Devil himself if he thought it would save a captured agent. In the next breath, he would condemn that agent to death on a suicide mission if he felt it was the right call to save many. This makes him one of the hardest men in the world to read, because this hides a multitude of faults. Like the fact that Fury trusts no one completely."

“You didn’t know they were monitoring Tony.” Darcy breathed out a harsh breath, one she didn’t know she had been holding in.

“I always assume we are being observed. I thought this fact would be obvious, lapochka. The only reason I decided to move into the Tower was for the greater degree of privacy. Jarvis’s eyes are far-reaching, but he has more morals than anyone else that has been commanded to watch me before.” Natasha shrugged. “But no, I did not know the extent and I did not participate in it.”

“Fair point.” Darcy nodded, eyes unfocused at the hazy sky. She tasted the truth on her lips, as she whispered out, “You didn’t know you were likely going to be ordered to take the Iron Man tech if Tony died of poisoning.”

Natasha lifted herself from the ground, holding her crossed knees in each hand. Looking at Darcy still staring up at the night sky. “I will not lie, it occurred to me. Knowing men in power, it was not beyond them, not even Fury, to grasp at poisons thinking they are medicine for all their ills. Even if Fury’s mission was explicitly about helping Tony Stark combat the poisoning.”

“Would you have done it? Had he asked?” Darcy asked, silently in the night. Not able to help herself, needing to know the answer.

Natasha smiled a broken smile, the most honest smile she had. “Assassination? No. Shield dare not use me for killing innocents who do not require death. They fear, perhaps justly, that I will turn on them as I turned on the Red Room after one innocent too many. Would I have taken the technology? Yes. I believe the American idiom says it best, ‘better the devil you know.’”

Darcy nodded, understanding. They did not know each other then, it would have been unfair to judge her for doing what she had always done, without the personal connections to Darcy or the Avengers to temper this.

“I don’t need to hear it but I want to hear you say it anyway,” Darcy said, finally sitting up to stare Natasha in the eyes. The both sat, the distant sound of a quiet city, grand and important, surrounded them. Even in the wan light of the evening, they were beautiful in their silence.

“I would not do it now, lapochka. Not any of it.” Natasha reassured Darcy, knowing what the girl meant. She did not begrudge the comfort of the words. They both knew how little and how much words meant. “Fury, Coulson and Hawkeye are the only things in Shield that command whatever loyalty I am capable of.”

“I think you’re capable of a hella of a lot, Nattie Ice.” Darcy tested out the nickname.

“No Darcy,” Natasha rolled her eyes, but there was a hint of laughter in them. _That one’s going to stick_ , thought Darcy.

The both sat in silence for a moment longer. “I’m glad you are part of the Avengers, Natasha.” Darcy added, eyes bright, a weight lifted off of her shoulders. Darcy dug into her purse, pulled on one of the jump drives she had brought for her. “Want to help me deal with Shield or the WSC gettin’ all up in our biznizz?”

“Must you speak that way, lapochka,” Natasha chided in amusement, but accepted the jump drive anyway.

“Help me figure out what our options are for stopping anything like this from happening _to us_ again,” she stressed.

A part of Darcy wanted to say ‘ _to_ _my people_ ’. It would have been just as truthful if somebody had asked Natasha’s opinion on that matter.

“Shield has been no home to me. Not the way the Avengers have,” Natasha admitted, as honest as she ever was. Completely honest in that moment, but incapable of capturing the truth of her in all moments. Natasha was made up of thousands of jigsaw pieces taken from hundreds of different puzzles.

“What do you need me to do?” Natasha asked, accepting a mission from someone that was not Nickolas Fury in what felt like a lifetime.


	6. Conversations of a Stark Nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plans move forward, plot thickens, Starks talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, my descriptions and titles are probably getting worse. I am totally brain dead but I really wanted to post this before I went to be (gah, 2am, why do I see you so often).
> 
> Sorry for the late post, the holidays have wonked up my schedule. Hope you all enjoy! I'm sorry if this isn't revealing more about the awkwardness, or what happened to Darcy's parents, that will be coming soon. Promise.
> 
> Warnings: Parent Feels; Implied Manipulation of Steve using feminine wiles; Darcy and Tony are trolls (especially about sex); giving employees sex toys as a joke/reward (what do you expect, Starks are strange?)

“You sure doing this call in public makes the most sense, Tony?” Darcy asked into the sleek black Stark Bluetooth piece in her ear. Her brunette hair, longer than her normal just under the shoulder length, was tied in a casual chignon bun at the nape of her neck. The woman was sipping on a dirty chai at the café just located next to the hotel’s convention center. “Couldn’t we wait until I’m back in the Tower to talk about potential astrophysicist recruits?”

She was sitting in a café, on the quiet Friday morning of the Women in Astrophysics Conference, reading a book on quantum mechanics. She was mostly ignoring it, having long finished the homework on the syllabus a class towards her MS program weeks ago. She had been taking to it with a pen and highlighter, cackling glee in highlighting the worst errors in the text book. Mostly, she had spent her morning on memes and knitting hacks videos on her Stark Pad.

“Now, now, chickadee, are you questioning my genius?” Tony’s voices came out, smooth and focused. Darcy could hear the faint sound of You in the background (she couldn’t tell you how she knew the difference between Dum-E’s and You’s whines, but she could).

Darcy discreetly adjusted the glasses dominating her face. The wonderful thing about her propensity for chunky hipster glasses, besides how hilarious she found them, was they were perfect for hiding discreet and advanced electronics. She saw the stat’s flash by on her screen, sent directly to her by Tony.

“Do you always answer questions with more questions?” Darcy asked, pulling up the security protocols discreetly on her Stark Tab, tracking potential signal threats pinged on her glasses.

 _Hmmm … one of the signals is being bounced through Sokovia. Interesting_ , she thought to herself.

“Do you always fly to a cesspool of politicians and sycophants just to get laid?” Tony asked, humor dry as the dessert and manic glee and commenting on Darcy’s sex life. They both knew to keep it vague on Darcy’s intended paramour, sowing misinformation their best strategy for keeping their personal lives safe right now. Natasha had consented earlier to continue the ruse of their sexual relationship, Darcy’s short-term girlfriend Trish and Natasha’s reputation would make it believable (particularly to the FBI). Shield already thought Steve was her beau (most because of Steve’s history and not because of Darcy’s), but would perhaps believe that a poly relationship between the three was brewing (thanks to Bruce, Tony and Pepper already having done so in the tower).

“Glass houses, Tony. Glass houses.” Darcy’s voice went low and dangerous, “Unless you want Bruce to know about some of the more _risqué_ Hulk pictures you keep in your spank bank. Don’t think I haven’t found those when I go snooping in your stuff.”

Tony, pretend affront and laughing delightedly, said “If you do, I swear to Newton and Einstein I will enroll you in MIT tomorrow and make sure all the whole school knows to look out for your addiction to sex and huffing from air duster cans.”

“Ugh, do you always have to win every conversation?” She said snidely, queuing up her email application to message the authors about both their shitty grammar and a draft of ideas on how the Riemann Zeta function connected to Lee-Yang theorem. She figured she’d pass if she could sketch this out well enough, she could fast track her way to a Math Ph.D. from somewhere that was not MIT. She smirked to herself at this thought.

“Have to, no. The inevitable consequence of my charming personality and astounding wit. Why yes, yes it is. Thank you for noticing.” Tony said, simultaneously focused on finishing You’s upgrades, talking with Darcy, and queuing up the anti-spy programs.

The young woman went on, completely ignoring the last statement, “Also, thank you. I didn’t before know that men in women’s lingerie is a thing. I truly didn’t realize that was a thing. I think it might become my thing.”

Tony tried not to choke on air. “That’s it. I’m updating Jarvis’ networking permissions and package screening security protocol. You can say goodbye to your propensity to shipping sex supplies to people in my Tower.”

“Sex toys for minions when they do good is an honored Special Projects tradition. And PG gay romance novels for the asexual guy in biology. And a gift card for the aromantic asexual girl under Bruce. Anyway, most of our minions are not getting enough action. I’ve checked,” Darcy stated, an almost evil almost cackle lacing her voice. She had once listened to Thor reciting a four hour epic of his own manly prowess in the land of the Light Elves. She had taken notes. _As long as I don’t have to see it, I don’t care_ , was Darcy’s general approach to anything related to sex. The people under her charge had to have a certain looseness of sexual mores to be able to be anywhere near Avenger’s like Tony or Thor. “Let’s not forget about the vast amounts of lube that the engineers need for what they claim are perfectly legitimate science reasons.”

Tony and Darcy had perfected misdirection with blasé attitudes down to an art form.

“Okay, Darcy. Decoy conversation is in place. Hologram tech on your glasses and blue tooth are a go. We’re clear.” Tony responded, voice all business, the faint sound of You’s final upgrades to his chassis completed. Tony had been upgrading his bots more sensitive components with EMP shielding.

 _Just in case_. If desperation was the mother of invention, then Paranoia was its evil stepmother.

Anyone clever enough to gain access to their phone call would think that they were having a conversation about recruiting the more promising astrophysicists at the conference to Stark Industries. If anyone was watching her lips, the holo-program would make it look like she was saying the same things as that same conversation. Darcy just had to be sure to not move too much, looking like she was focused on the Stark Pad in her hands.

It was not uncommon for Stark Industries to attend conferences for minorities and women in STEM, to swoop up the best talent discontent in their stagnated positions in other labs or industries. In fact, that was one of Darcy’s objectives for the weekend. Darcy had a list of three women, two brilliant junior physicists at Fermilab and a promising grad student soon graduating from Princeton, that she would be offering contracts with Special Projects before she departed back to New York on Sunday. She would seek them out at the Networking Lunch soon to make first contact.

“Huh, thank god. I mean, I have no problem talking sex with you. I could probably learn a hell of a lot from you, old man. But I prefer the practice the scientific method myself, if you know what I mean.” Darcy said, closing out the email application on her stark pad, to bring up her pre-prepared notes on the scientists they wanted to recruit. They had planned every detail of the deception, down to a tee, in case they needed to talk but not look like they were trying to hide anything or give away they knew they were being spied on.

No one was within five feet of her, and the noise-cancelling device in her purse was running to guarantee none of the words would be overheard unless they were within that range. She didn’t want to make it look like she wasn’t taking precautions of being overheard, no precautions would be a red flag.

“Science sex joke. Smort! Noice!” Tony sends her a high-five emoji to her glasses, before his face dominated the screen of her vision. The outline of him was hazy, light, more like a ghost than a man. His beard was sharply groomed, his eyes looked deceptively well-rested. Though Darcy knew he had been getting no more than his usual handful of hours of sleep each night.

“You’ve been watching too much Andy Samburg in _Brooklyn Nine Nine_ ,” Darcy mumbled out. According to the clock on her Starkpad, she had about a few minutes before Darcy would need to make it back to meet Jane before the lunch networking event. She smoothed invisible wrinkles in her favorite green blouse.

Little dots, almost imperceptible appeared on her screen. They prompted her to swipe at the information on queues determined by their imaginary conversation. Like she thought before, every detail.

“Blaspheme and lies,” Tony said, briefly holding a screwdriver in his mouth, while he brought up his own Stark Pad. “Okay, young padawan. Ready for the update?”

“Fire away, Iron Dude.” Her fingers twitch, tempted to email Steve to get him to draw a surfer parody ‘Iron Man.’ She smirked to herself once more.

“Pepper and Jarvis are doing deep background checks of every major Stark executive, working their way top down. Bruce and I are handling the scientists in Special Projects. So far, no red flags for potential Shield operatives. Though, there is an intern that just started working with Eric Selvig. Ian Boothby, first year at University College London, specializing in atmospheric physics and instrumentation. Bright, lots of potential, could have gotten a paid internship but is interning without pay for Dr. Eric I-Must-Not-Wear-Pants Selvig. Might be something but nothing confirmed yet. Slow going, since Shield’s ability to make fake identities is pretty good (e.g. Natalie Rushman). Not even accounting for people who are actually who they say they are, and just also happen to be working on someone else’s dime.”

Darcy does not nod along, conscious of the delicate hologram being projected by her Bluetooth and glasses. Instead, she hummed at the appropriate times.

“Natasha is on board,” Darcy added, firmly into her headphone, when she realized Tony was done with his updates. Darcy continued, “I gave her the list of politicians from the Japanese Diet, China’s National People’s Congress and the Federal Assembly of Russia. She’ll compile reports on which legislators she thinks will back a fully independent Avengers Initiative, which will support censuring Shield but not independence, and which will oppose us either way. She can have plans within five days with all of our options, including espionage plans to overcome any major political oppositions, with Shield being none the wiser.”

Tony nodded. Natasha was their best resource in those countries. Pepper already had a solid lock on the UK, France, Germany, and Italy. Bruce, from his work in Brazil, Mexico and India as a doctor and runaway, was surprisingly well connected to their local politicians. In fact, he had standing invitations for citizenship in those countries after it was revealed the Traveling Doctor was a giant green superhero who guarded his things fiercely.

Clint, of all people, had ties to the Canadian Parliament and the CSIS and was working that angle. He wouldn’t explain why he was so well connected in Canada.

Tony continued, “Good. What about the other thing?”

Darcy huffed out a breath, “No, I told you I wouldn’t ask her to break into Fury’s servers.”

Tony’s eyes sharpened at the girl, eyes like the center of a Bunsen burner. “You know that mass data transfer capabilities are likely only in Fury’s hands, maybe Hill’s. We’ll need a discreet connection to one of them before we can launch our program.”

Tony, in a caffeinated flurry, had finished the data transferring mechanism a few days ago. There was just one major obstacle. The program opened a window of opportunity to transfer the data but it closed quickly. It needed a server built to handle an exodus of a lot of information in a short period of time. Hoth wasn’t built to handle it. Once they had proper leverage in Shield’s servers, there would be nothing stopping them from finding everything there would be to find.

Plus, they still needed to know where Phil stood before they dared attempt it. None of them were looking forward to that, least of all Darcy.

“I know that Tony. I didn’t ask Natasha, but it’s the Black Widow. I didn’t have to open my mouth. She said she would be sending me a little gift soon.” The conviction in Darcy’s voice was enough to still Tony. He took a moment, from his computer screen, to undetectably access some of the security cameras in the area around Darcy.

He watched her profile from a hotel security camera, face indecipherable but he recognized the determined tilt to her shoulders.

Tony, raised his hands in defeat. “Alright. You know that Plan B is going to have you use your feminine wiles on Captain Wears-Shirts-From-Boys-Section-Tight to have him get you into Shield office’s in DC, right?”

The alternative, if Natasha wasn’t willing to help them get a connection to Shield, was to use Darcy. If Darcy batted her eyes and asked Steve for a tour of Shield, Steve would jump at the chance like a golden retriever with a tennis ball. No one would question Captain America, while Darcy ran a decryption program not unlike the one Tony deployed on the Helicarrier (“Only much more subtle and much more likely to be undetected,” she crowed at Tony, as she slashed at his code in manic glee.)

The debate with Tony was whether or not Steve was let in on the secret. Tony was on the ‘not yet’ side while Darcy was ‘yes.’ Either way, Darcy could and would use Steve to get the information she needed. Which was a thought that made her extremely uncomfortable with herself.

Darcy was sorely tempted to convince Dum-E that Tony wasn’t eating his smoothies, just to watch the man get that particular throbbing forehead vein from the eager but clumsy robot.

“I know exactly what I need to do, Tony. Now, let’s cut the bull-shit for just a bit okay. Why else did you want to talk?” Darcy had to force her fists not to tighten, keep her shoulders loose, to not give away her mounting aggravation. “There’s no way this conversation needed to happen right now, not when it would have been smarter to wait until I got back on Monday. There’s something else. I know your particular brand of BS, Anthony Edward Stark. So, spill.”

Tony had a way of getting under her skin. In Tony’s defense, though Darcy didn’t know it, the young girl had a way of doing the exact same.

Tony let out a deep sigh. “Did anyone ever tell you that you are too smart by half?”

“Almost every day of my entire life,” Darcy added, mischievous and unrepentant.

Darcy almost didn’t hear the faint murmur of ‘That’s my girl’ under Tony’s breath. She ignored it, and the throb in her chest just under her ribs. She ignored a lot of things, too many things, sometimes.

“Contrary to popular belief, Howard and Maria Stark did not leave all of their estate to me at their death.” It dug under Tony’s skin, how many times he had to do things like this. Bare some part of his past, what he thought were scars and realized were only old scabs, ready to bleed at the slightest provocation.

“All of my mother’s considerable estate prior to her marriage to my dad went to the Maria Stark Foundation. Controlling interest in Stark Industries and most of the liquid assets of Howard and Maria were left to me, mostly in trust under Obadiah Stane, until I turned 25. There were things left out. Physical properties like Stark Manor, warehouses and homes not a part of Stark Industries, 45% ownership of a vibranium processing plant in Wakanda, stock in major US companies. They were portioned out separately to be held in trust for any biological children I willingly have.”

 _It was easier, this way_ , Darcy would think. As she stared at Tony’s shuttered face, uncomfortable but intensely curious to hear about this piece of Stark history. Something she didn’t think anyone outside of the Stark sphere of influence knew. It was easier, she thought, to both of them to hear this at a distance. Where shared blood and unshared memories would color the air between them, where he looked at her with eyes that saw Maria Stark and she could look at him without thinking of a man named George with a kind and exasperated smile.

“The old man always knew how much I hated those houses.” Malibu was the first home Tony Stark built for himself, using the money he had earned himself, using the technology he had created himself. He hadn’t taken a step into the Howard Stark Mansion in NYC since he was drunk, barely legal, and recently orphaned. Tony probably would have torn down all of the houses, scattered across the world, and sold everything else in a bitter, drunken haze.

“Howard left specific requirement for inheritance. The first identified child with the Stark name inherits everything when they turn 21. Additional children, even if they are older than the first identified heir, have special provisions for full education coverage at MIT and small pay-outs of only half a million. If I don’t have a kid by the time I die, the houses get converted to museums, the rest passes to the Maria Stark Foundation.”

Darcy sometimes perceived that Howard encouraged Tony to act a bit like royalty, distant and superior. To an extent, expecting Tony to “continue the Stark line” but discouraged him from “seeding too many wild oats” to avoid complications in passing on an empire. Mostly, it boggled Darcy’s mind that Tony could talk so dismissively of several hundred thousand dollars.

“Okay Tony. Why is this relevant now? Not that I’m not, like, super appreciative to hear about the major …” she fought not to fidget and also to reassure Tony, not quite sure how this must be triggering him at the moment, “complicatedness between Howard and his ideas of grandchildren.”

Tony looked like he was being drained of life, like his batteries were running low. She wondered if this was the most recent of a long line of reasons that kept Tony up at night.

“The estate for the grandchild is worth close to 1 billion dollars, close to half of that in physical properties. The estates currently auto-renew on 10-year leases. If a beneficiary is determined within 30 days of the end of the leases, they can change the terms of the lease, even liquidate the properties. Otherwise, they are stuck with them for another ten years.”

Tony bit out a deep sigh, one that Darcy echoed. They waited a second, in silence, wondering which of them would break the silence first.

Darcy spoke first, saying, “And because that is just my life, let me guess. That is coming up soon?”

Tony nodded. “May 31st.” The short response, lack of glib, underlined the severity of what Tony was feeling at the moment.

“I thought we were going to keep this under wraps, Tony.” Darcy said, never feeling more awkward that she still almost never refers to Tony as anything other than Tony. Perhaps an occasional “Iron Dork” and “Iron Dude.”

Darcy could see the moment Tony’s eyes turned into scalpels, dissecting every inch of her. He said, heavily, “Several people had just tried to kidnap you just for being affiliated with Stark Industries. Pepper was shot, you had just killed several men. You were having nightmares for weeks, Darcy. You weren’t ready to hear about making a decision that could bankrupt small nations.”

Darcy understood his point, she really did. She was a mess, was still a mess to an extent. She didn’t know if she could have then, or even now, dealt with the reality of the world she was living in. But it _was_ her reality. She of all people knew that wanting something to not be dangerous, wanting things to always be safe and happy, was not possible. It was, in fact, rarely possible.

“You needed to know this. You needed to have time to make a decision about what you want to do, what you want to have done. It is, literally, your birthright.” Tony smiled, the bright and soft one, that she saw him use for Dum-E and You and Jarvis. “Technically, it would also be illegal for me to withhold this from you. All you would need is a DNA test and proof that I had willingly interacted with your mom to create you. Coercion, cloning, or in any way forced need not apply. Which was not the case.” Tony wiggled his eyebrows. “At all.”

“God, even when you’re trying to be serious you’re still a jackass. Honestly, if I wasn’t so impressed, I would be offended,” Darcy huffed out.

She checked the timer. They had less than a minute left. Darcy absently poked at the tablet screen, trying her best like she was winding down an exasperating conversation with Tony. It wasn’t that hard to pretend.

“You said ‘with the Stark name,’” Darcy asked without asking.

“I had a lawyer check the language when I first saw their will. Dear old dad was vague about that. You just need to put Stark in the name somewhere. You could change your name to Stark-Lewis or Lewis-Stark or Darcy Stark-Sucks Lewis-Rocks and it’d be valid.” Tony was going for funny, but he had the strong suspicion he was failing.

“Take your time, kiddo. You have it. The DNA test has been done. Just a few forms, a notarized statement from myself, and presto chango, you’re legally the next Stark heir.” He unconsciously reached towards the computer screen, to ruffle down that tuft of hair she called bangs but always was out of control. He stopped mid motion, embarrassed with himself.

Darcy nodded, once, sharply. “Okay, well. So that was heavy. I’m going to go repress for a while, and deal with it later. Perhaps after getting smashed, and convincing Steve to let me touch his butt.” Tony smiled, amused. “Yeah, that sounds like a solid plan.”

The time threshold came to a close, and she stood as the edges of the hologram on her face disappeared. “Okay, Tones. I’ll need to head to the networking lunch now if I want to corner the candidates for Jane. I’ll talk to you when I get back to the Tower on Monday, okay?” She wondered if the strain in her voice, like a frog in her throat, would be obvious to outside observers.

“Take care Darcy Lewis,” he added, conciliatorily, smile still soft and sad on his face.

Darcy Lewis, perhaps someday Stark, walked towards the conference center back straight, head held high, and body relaxed (through sheer force of will alone).

She absent mindedly entered the hotel conference center, making her way to the escalators to head up to the second floor. The conference was mostly held in the rooms and area on the other side of the complex, but this was the most direct path to it.

Her head in the clouds, walking to her destination, she distracted herself mentally by mentally working on the Riemann Zeta function in her head, using what she had learned about statistical mechanics.

Just as she was closing in on a turn, just past a corner where the majority of people were already located and queueing up for lunch, she heard the soft click of a door opening behind her. She tensed.

She tensed at a lot of things nowadays.

She forced herself to try to stay relaxed, to be prepared to react, and tried to convince her legs to keep taking her in the direction she was going.

“Hello, Darcy. Natasha said we needed to talk,” Agent Philip Coulson’s voice came out bland and amused, behind her.


	7. Three Down, Zero to Go (AKA Darcy Isn't a Spy But She'd Make a Good One)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy confront Coulson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey All,
> 
> Sorry that my update schedule has changed. The every other day is no longer feasible, job hunting and all that jazz taking up my life. I will endeavor to update as fast as possible (I'm not giving up) but it might be more like once a week.
> 
> I tried to include a little more action in this chapter, I wanted to get away from the heavy exposition I feel like I'm prone to (and good at).
> 
> Warnings: Spy chase (probably unbelievable but totally fun); Manipulation (emotional blackmail?); Guns; Unspoken threat against Phil's AoS team

Darcy turned, pivoting her whole body on the heel of one foot, a sort of demented runway model move. She stared flatly at Agent Coulson, standing there calmly with his hands held carefully in front of him, dark-glasses covering his eyes in the cool light of the hotel. Not because it was bright, because Darcy noticed the light fading of a bruise at his left eye.

Darcy paused, just a moment, before she decided something.

“You know what?” She asked, rhetorically, throwing her hands up in the air like she just didn’t care. “No. I’m not doing this right now.”

His face remained perfectly placid.

“Don’t give me that face,” Darcy continued. “I’ve had a long day.”

A muscle in Agent Coulson’s face twitched, subtly.

“Yes, G-man, I know you probably had a shitty day too. But in the words of the immortal white girl, right now I _can’t even_.”

His eyebrow raised a fraction of an inch.

“Nope, I’m not letting you …”

He subtly readjusted his body posture. Like peeping sneakily between closed curtains, the knowledge that he was bruised and likely wounded was made subtly evident.

The growl, sub-vocal and dangerous, came from the back of Darcy’s throat. It was force of will that kept her body from betraying herself right now. The anger, bright and sharp, threw fuel onto the fire of her mind. She analyzed him, with her Stark eyes and her Lewis understanding of people, and conceded.

“Okay, you know what? Fine. Tonight, 5pm, meet me at the Smithsonian Zoo.” Her eyes were as sharp as razor blades. “Bring your new team. I want to meet them.”

Agent Coulson’s face betrayed nothing. Darcy moved to turn, when Coulson carefully launched something at her face. She caught it with one hand, more than used to the spies in her life throwing things at her unexpectedly to test her reflexes.

It was a Snicker’s bar. She unwrapped it, biting into it fiercely, with a triumphant grin.

“Yeah yeah yeah. You’re a funny man. See you and the kiddies tonight.” She turned and left, channeling a jaguar into the motions of her body, a predator.

-

Darcy was sitting a bench, in the very front, wearing a bright blue coat, her computerized hipster glasses, and a kitten-ear knit hat in black. The young woman was sitting on the bench, the picture of youthful disinterest and self-absorption, while scrolling on her phone. She might have been playing up the stereotypes she knew people thought of her: busty, quirky, girl like a more genius version of Zooey Deschanel from her third favorite show _New Girl_.

A notification from Jarvis pinged on her notification tab. She swiped it away.

She sent off a quick text. ‘You let this play out, and I promise you dirt on who Hill is currently sleeping with’ read the text.

The response came quickly, ‘You should hit Ward first. You’ll know him when you see him.’

‘You’re the best. I owe you cookies,’ Darcy didn’t bother to hide the smirk growing on her face. She didn’t see anyone in her periphery just yet, but she knew they could likely see her.

‘Caramel fudge brownies,’ came the response. Darcy nodded sharply once at her phone, before look up from the screen, face sweet and sharp under the almost dark of the evening.

About 10 feet from the girl, in a loose semi-circle, stood Coulson’s little band of misfits. Coulson flanked on his left by Melinda May, a petite but vicious agent. On Coulson’s right was Grant Ward, dark and handsome in the stick-up-the-butt kind of way that Darcy recognized as a symptom typical to young Shield field agents. To Ward’s right, were a pair of bright-eyed scientists, a blond and shy looking Leopold Fitz with the brown haired and eager Jemma Simmons (Darcy could tell, having the spent the last years wrangling scientists, that the first was an engineer and the latter a biochemist, just based on their nervous tics). The last of the group, at the end standing next to Jemma, was the young Skye (no Last Name), with a cocky, playful smirk typical of orphans and hackers.

Darcy drank them in with her eyes, lips dancing in mirth, before she stood.

“I feel like I’m meeting my dad’s secret family in Florida or something.” Darcy drawled out, smoothing down the lines of her coat.

“Don’t bother introducing yourselves, she already knows who you all are,” Agent Coulson said aloud, amusedly. “Everyone, meet Darcy Lewis, head of Special Projects at Stark Industries, hacker, and overall pain in my side.”

Skye’s smirk, eyes scanning Darcy top to bottom, “Come on, AC, I think you meant ‘ass.’”

“We’re not children, you can curse in front of us,” came Simmons’s indignant reply.

“Hello,” Leo said, with stars in his eyes, Scottish brogue rougher than usual. “I read your article on the applicability of P versus NP as it relates to automation.” A blush stained his cheeks, “Was nice work.”

Ward nodded stonily, “Ma’am.” She quirked her body, emphasizing her curves, daring him to check her out. He remained passively blank.

Agent May nodded, a smile dancing in her eyes but face peaceful.

“Oh my god, Melinda. You were right. They are like adorable puppies.” Darcy exclaimed jovially, striding forward directly into Ward’s personal space, just to watch him stiffen up. “Sexy, too,” she rumbled out.

“No terrorizing, Darcy. I don’t need another New Mexico on my hands,” Coulson smiled placidly.

She ignored Coulson, staring up into the buff man’s cool blues. “Anyone ever tell that your thing for petite and dark haired will get you into trouble?” She asked Ward, coyly.

The severe faced agent raised an eyebrow, text-book spy move but amateur in comparison to the people Darcy knew, “Someone’s been telling you stories.”

“Ms. Lewis, can we get to whatever it is you wished to discuss with me and my team?” Coulson asked, letting exasperation seep into his voice.

“I like this girl,” Darcy heard Skye stage whisper to Jemma to the side.

Quickly, she turned to make eye contact with Agent Coulson, only a few feet from her but still plenty of space to allow her to execute her plan. “Don’t worry, we’re getting to that. Just one thing first,” she smiled wickedly, purposefully misleading Coulson to think she was laying the moves on Ward.

Darcy grinned, shooting a quick look at the six people located around her, before glancing up one more time directly into Ward’s face. “And no, Ward. No one’s been telling me stories. I saw you deliberately not check me out. And I’m definitely trouble. Think of it more as a promise than a question.”

With that, a gun slipped out of her coat into her hand, and she had it pressed to his sternum in less than a second. She pulled the trigger. She pulled the trigger three more times, rapidly and grinning wildly. A soft splat echoed out each time.

Before Coulson could react, Darcy tossed him the modified gun in her hand.

Bright purple dye marks seeped onto the torso on all but May and Coulson. They others were frozen in spot. “Don’t worry, G-man. Just a souped-up paintball gun. Designed to deliver a neuro-toxin Stark Bio cooked up for me. It is a paralytic, only about five minutes on this dosage. Still haven’t worked out the temporary deafness, but that will wear off within ten.” She wondered if she gave too much away, but refused to worry about it.

Agent May was visibly smiling at the antics. The vein in Coulson’s forehead came out to play. “Would you like to explain why you just incapacitated my team?”

“Yes, but not here.” Darcy removed the blue coat, revealing weather appropriate athletic gear underneath. Coulson’s eyes could tell she had another paintball gun at the small of her back. Taking out her phone and slipping into her pocket first, she then tossed her coat and the cap on her head to Agent May. “Thanks Melinda. Poker with Hill and Natasha next week? I’ll fly you all to New York.”

“I’ll bring pretzels,” Agent May added, the short Asian woman completely deadpan.

Darcy met Coulson’s eyes, letting the mask of humor slip briefly to see the severity behind her words, “Clint did tell me I needed to practice my evasion. That gun will be locked for 30 more seconds. You catch up to me, and hit me with one of those, we talk on your terms. If not, we talk on mine.”

Before Coulson had a chance to confirm or deny the shenanigans, she swiped out with a leg, nearly missing the gun due to Coulson’s quick reflexes. It flew out of Coulson’s hands. “Starting now.”

She took off at a sprint, laughing fey-like, away from the zoo. As she turned the corner of a building, she could hear the fumbling of the weapon, and what sounded like German cursing behind him. Melinda’s laughter was sharp and amused.

She felt the soft splat of the first shot of the weapon hit the corner of a gate, as she took a sharp turn.

Darcy had spent all of her afternoon mapping out Washington, DC for just this purpose. She had committed every alleyway to memory, hacked city websites to find the most up-to-date information on every building in the area, from fire-code violations, to floor plans, to placement of fire escapes.

Therefore, Coulson’s “Are you kidding me?” when she veered right, barely getting missed by a car pulling out of an underground parking lot in an apartment complex, dodging between two buildings. She hit the back gate, climbing over it rapidly, and hopping to the other side.

She veered left, and immediately left again, up a fire escape on the next building, up two flights of stairs before Coulson had her back in his line of sights. She saw him aim, and pull the trigger. She pulled at her gun, returning fire rapidly and calmly the way Clint had her practice. Back to the wall, leg braced the way Clint showed her, she cast herself into the air, landing onto of the store-front apartment buildings next door.

She hopped through several buildings, before the lens on her glasses pinged her upcoming exit. Darcy scaled down the side of the building, before coming back onto the major street. She took her athletic hoodie off, turning it inside out, where it turned from a neon green, to a soft non-descript gray. She pulled a running cap out of her left pocket, pulling her hair into it, and tossed the paintball gun into the first trash can she noticed.

She made it to the United States Naval Observatory before felt the hair at the back of her heads tingle. There were several people around, a couple on a pre or post-dinner stroll. A woman out with her dog.

She started sprinting all out when the tingle became a full body shudder. Banking suddenly at turns, dodging between buildings, houses, running straight through Glover Archibald Park. She picked up a backpack, that she had had deposited there earlier that day, slipping her clothes into it, and removing a new jacket and dropping the backpack back down on the floor.

The backpack had a scarf with the American University logo on it, intended to either give Coulson pause or make him think she was going in that direction. She didn’t know if it would work, but a girl could hope.

She ran more swiftly, not stopping to see if she was being chased. She could feel it, an instinct clawing at the back of her neck. She ducked behind the alley of a restaurant, going in through the back entrance, hitting a kitchen full of people talking in nothing but Spanish, staring at her befuddled as she sped through the kitchen, out into the front of the restaurant, and out onto the street.

At the end of the block for that restaurant, she found the motorcycle she had placed. As she hopped on, and started to speed away, she could see the picture of Agent Coulson exiting the restaurant, gun nowhere to be seen, from behind her.

She was at George Washington University minutes later. She biked by the Davis School of Performing arts, tossing a small beacon out of her pocket that Coulson would be able to pick up if he were tracking her digitally. She thought it rather poetic.

From there, she took Georgetown Park, then merged onto Rock Creek and Potomac Road PKW. When she reached near the area she had landed with Thor only a day ago near the JFK Center, she pulled the motorcycle off the concrete near a light, and onto the side grass. She walked up to a tree at the edge of the railing, propped up in the lowest branches and nearly fading into the background due to the dark of the night was a sensor Natasha had placed for her earlier today.

She looked out onto the Teddy Roosevelt Island, watching the behemoth that was the Triskelion facing out onto DC, cold and hard and remote. She saw a Shield Quin-jet, likely powered by Tony’s consultation work to Shield, sit atop its structure and she felt bile in her throat.

She lifted the sensor, propping it on her shoulder, still faced out to the river, while pulling out her phone. Walking as close as she dared to the railing her glasses readjusted, she hit the prompt on her phone that would show her the information the sensor had learned.

Her glasses refocused, broadcasting a light in bright, blue concentric circles before zooming in slowly into one crisp image in her eyes. “Three down, two across, just at the line of concrete on the external building,” she murmured to herself. The focus zoomed automatically, before pinging that it had locked.

The sensor confirmed: _Office of Nickolas J. Fury, Director_. Four other offices, in quick succession, pinged as well. _Office of Alexander Pierce, Secretary to WSC; WSC Conference Room; Office of Maria Hill, Assistant Director; Office of Philip Coulson, Head of Talent Acquisition and Special Investigations._

She twisted in her hands, disassembling it quickly (she had helped Tony design it), before launching it into the river. The casing was designed to erode quickly in wet conditions, leaving nothing to be salvaged.

She waited for another thirty seconds before she felt the splat of paint against the small of her back. Darcy rolled her eyes epically, taking off the new coat she had just donned, to throw it to the ground. She held her hands up in the air, turning around.

Coulson was across the street, looking at her steadily with the gun in his hands, as cars zoomed by between them.

He raised one eyebrow sharply, crossing the street quickly but not lowering the paintball gun. “The rounds you gave me were dud.”

Darcy shook her head, “Nope, I injected myself with the anti-toxin earlier. Special Projects policy I put into place for Bio, no toxins without a viable anti-toxin.”

“Sensible,” he said, letting the paintball gun flip over between his fingers, handing it back to her. She accepted it leaning against the railing to the river. “I figured you wouldn’t want anyone to keep a Stark gun, even paintball guns.”

Darcy nodded, looking at the man. Even now, cheeks ruddy from the cool night, having several miles trip in a short period of time (some of that flat-out running), and he still looked unruffled. The brunette girl was jealous.

Darcy beckoned Coulson to come closer to her. When he approached just past the tree, to settle next to her on the railing, she figured he was in range of the jamming and white-noise devices on her person.

“Was that a threat or a test?” Coulson asked Darcy, eyes settling on Shield Headquarters. A part of him, the part of him that was a patriot at heart, relaxed at the sight. He didn’t let it show on the outside.

“Both, I think,” Darcy admitted.

“You’ve never had to prove you were dangerous to me, Darcy Lewis,” he pronounced sagaciously. “I knew that the moment Clint kept going back to you for his leaves.”

“Clint does like dangerous things,” she smiled.

Coulson’s whole posture went hard. “I don’t accept threats against team members, Darcy. Not from anyone. Especially not from family.”

“You’re not the only one that takes that seriously, _Phil_ ,” she sighed out.

“What does that mean?” He asked. She didn’t answer, just shrugging. “Does Clint know you’re doing this?” Coulson asked, secretly dreading the question. Knowing that this conversation was going to go in a direction he was not prepared for.

“Not specifically, no. I did give him the courtesy of a heads-up so he could get out of the line of fire or prepare damage control.”

“Then what is this about?” He asked.

“You do like your secrets, Phil,” Darcy drawled out sarcastically. “You’re lucky you’re having this conversation with me. I had to fight Tony and Pepper to have this conversation with you. Pepper was going to cancel her inspection of the Hong Kong offices.”

Coulson relaxed into the railing. That told him almost everything he needed to know. “Something tells me you’ll find out the truth either way.”

“I’d rather hear it from you,” she shrugged.

“Alright, ask.” He was tired and still bruised from his most recent attempt to uncover the identity of an enigmatic mastermind calling himself the Clairvoyant.

They took a moment, to stand in silence. One point, a long time ago, Phil thought he would be the one to bring Darcy to this building, a doe-eyed new agent. It saddened him, that she led him here, through wiles and manipulation, for an end he couldn’t see clearly but consequences brewing that he knew (with the bone deep surety of a lifetime of spy work) that he would not be able to avoid.

“How long have you known that Shield was spying on the Avengers?” Darcy asked, calmly into the night like the question wouldn’t land like a boulder into a shallow pond.

“Since the Initiative was deemed a programmatic necessity by Directory Fury five years ago, when we noticed a significant increase over several years of individuals with superhuman abilities. II was tasked in coordinating the roster.” He didn’t choke on the words, Agent Coulson never struggled with his words. In the spy world, everything came back around.

“Your question,” Darcy said softly. Dangerously.

“Why did you paralyze my team?” Coulson, secretly jaded, asked because he always wanted to be prepared for vindictive retaliation. The girl beside him could ruin his team if she got it into her mind to do so, and there was little he could do to prevent it. Darcy Lewis (secretly Stark) was too damn important to be punished for destroying the lives of a handful of misfit Shield agents given to a broken middle-aged man trying to prove he that he was still a badass.

Darcy huffed out. “I’m not punishing them for you or anything like that. I didn’t want them to follow or hear our conversation. Melinda would leave me to it, she knows our history, and would stay to make sure the kiddies were okay. It was also is easier to let her make assumptions about what she thinks we’re talking about.” She held her hands up, in faux-defeat. “And perhaps, because I was feeling a little bit bitchy and I just wanted you to know that _I could_.”

Coulson nodded sharply, shoulder’s loosening. “Fair.” It was a very Natasha response. The young woman perhaps being more shaped by the spies in her life than Coulson, having been out of the Tower more often than not, hadn’t been able to see.

“How much Stark technology does Shield have?” She asked plainly.

“All the non-lethal work Stark has done as a consultant. Schematic for pretty much everything before the Jericho missiles.” He paused, debating, before he continued on. “The WSC was pushing for scapegoating Clint after the Helicarrier. Clint’s a loyalist, which the WSC disapproves of. He came onto the WSC radar in a bad way, when he brought in Natasha. Fury’s compromise to allow him to stay alive, was that he would authorize the collection of broken and discarded samples of Stark tech left on the field during operational clean up. Anything beyond that, I’m in the dark. Above my level or Fury eyes only.”

Darcy turned, letting the arm slip off her shoulder, to stare at Coulson directly into his eyes. “He hid information about your death so he could use you against the WSC, didn’t he?”

Coulson nodded, “There is no better spy than one that everyone thinks is dead. If information of them being alive leaks out, that is useful too.”

“I fucked that up,” she said. He nodded simply. “So that’s why Fury’s resorting to power plays using Natasha and Steve.”

“You know the saying, _God laughs at the plans of man_. In Shield, our saying is ‘God laughs at the plans of man, but Fury always laughs last.’”

This was the closest Phil Coulson had to religion, having seen too much to be anything other than a reluctant agnostic. He trusted, absolutely, that Fury knew what he was doing and was doing it for the good of others. It was the foundation for his love of Shield.

“You never said anything about it,” she stated, as a way to ask another question with asking another question.

“It was my job not to.” He said, “Things with the WSC are too tenuous to let anything slip. Not even to you guys. Especially not right now.”

Darcy inclined her head, letting him know it was his turn to ask a question. “The last time we talked, your program could barely find anything relevant about Strike Team delta. What changed?” He felt it was a much safer question than asking _How badly did you commit treason_?

Nor would it do well to remind Darcy that he had asked her, a few weeks after his recovery, about what information she could about the surgery that fixed the hole in his chest. The itchy wrongness of it still grated on his nerves, something still not right about it to him. But he wouldn’t ask after that information right now, not when he was on such delicate ground.

“You know, that if anyone is going to take blame for that, it will be you, right?” Darcy answered smugly. “I would have never gone into Shield like I did if you didn’t ask me.”

Even now, Coulson did not even let himself think about the shitstorm that prompted that desperate request. What surprised him more, was how much Darcy was able to deliver. Tony could have done it sure, but he was a genius’ genius. Skye, who had spent her lifetime hacking, would have struggled to do what Darcy made look simple.

Coulson’s face stayed deadpan, knowing Darcy would see that as amusement.

“I took it as a challenge. I improved it, made it better. Expanded it to exploit weaknesses in security that its more juvenile programming couldn’t handle but I knew had to exist. That’s all I’m going to tell you about that.” She said firmly.

Darcy did trust Phil. She just wasn’t sure, right now, to which extent she could trust _Agent Coulson_. He understood that, in that moment, and let it lie.

“How much have you reported to Shield yourself?” Darcy asked, suppressing a shiver in her spine. _Did you tell them I’m a Stark_? was left unsaid between them.

“Before the Manhattan Invasion, everything. After that, only general information. My interpretation of states of mind, developments in interpersonal relationships, non-specific updates on breakthroughs in technology.” Unsure of his welcome, he extended a hand, gently, onto her shoulder. “Nothing about you guys they wouldn’t have gotten from other sources. Any requests for blood samples have been ignored. Nothing specific that I thought could be used against one of you.” _Nothing about you_.

“Fury knows,” Darcy guessed.

“Fury knows about your hacking skill and why I wanted to recruit you to Shield before you and Jane were driven to Stark Industries. Anything beyond that,” he shrugged, “he didn’t hear from me. But Fury isn’t dumb and he knows the Stark family well. He could have easily known just by looking at you.”

The silence between them had shifted slowly back toward comfortable.

“What are you going to do?” Coulson asked, not really expecting a completely honest answer.

He could see the mask she slipped on, perfect and well-worn not unlike the mask of the playboy Tony often wore. Darcy’s perfect mask, irreverent and a little inappropriate, a touch over-sexualized but nerdy all at once.

“We’re going to do what we’ve always done. Be afraid of Natasha, have Thor fuck with reporters, get Bruce to cook for us and let Pepper convince us to watch Gilmore Girls. Tony in the background, Jane secretly egging him on, making everything chaos. I’m going to go on a date with Steve tomorrow, and I am going to tell you every excruciating detail on how I’m going to redefine the phrase ‘where no man has gone before.’”

 _Perhaps it isn’t a mask_ , Coulson thought. That, more than anything, made him feel the harsh weight of his years as a spy. Mostly an administrator, often an handler, occasionally a field agent, but always a spy.

“And we’re going to do it because we want to. Because that is who we are and fuck anybody who tells us otherwise. We’re going to do it, and make sure no one, _no one_ , thinks they can use us like pawns.” She thought she spoke for all of them, but she knew she spoke mostly for herself.

She turns, brushing the arm off her shoulder casually, giving him the full force of her gaze. “Do what you need to do, for your job and for Shield. Limit your contact so you don't overhear anything you would feel compelled to report. Stay out of the Tower until this blows over. Say you’re fighting with Tony, people will believe it. Then, be prepared to grovel for the few months after that. You’re going to have to let Tony do his crazy ‘I don’t know how to express my affection except through expensive gifts’ thing and take Pepper shopping and give Clint countless orgasms.”

“I can do that.” He nodded solemnly, out onto the night. He pulled out his phone, ordering a pick up from Melinda, “Come on, I’ll order in pizza. You can meet my team properly.”

Darcy nodded, eyes far away, staring through the JFK center, like she could see all of DC’s most famous monuments behind her eye lids.

She looked at Coulson, hugging him sharply. “Lets be perfectly clear. We understand you are doing your job and that your job is important. Clint will stay with you no matter what, and Natasha, because they’re loyal to you like that. But if it is at the expense of the emotional well-being of the rest of the others, I will cut you out of our lives with a surgical precision that Natasha would envy. If you betray us too far and deliberately endanger our _safety_ , I will destroy you and your career, but leave you alive to regret your choices. Is that clear?”

Philip Coulson never contemplated having children. His lifestyle, for one, and his sexuality, for another, never had it in the cards. Sure, he’d gotten a couple of requests to be a sperm donor from some retiring Shield agents looking to start a family, but he never took that up.

He saw Natasha’s wiles, Clint’s loyalty, Tony’s mind, Pepper’s caring, Bruce’s kindness, Thor’s joy, Jane’s silliness. Looking at her, wondering and perhaps a bit sad, if any of the fierce and unyielding young woman before him, not yet even 23, was influenced by him.

He would be proud if that was true.

“Come along, Darcy. Let me tell you about the time Natasha had to keep a mini-poodle for her cover and how it peed on Clint.”

It was clear as it ever needed to be between the pair.


	8. Darcy Does Politics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy was perfectly willing to play games. (Lets just hope they work out for her).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey folks,
> 
> I am almost definitely going to have to stick to my a once-a-week update schedule. Sucks for both of us! I don't know if it is one of my better chapters, I've been writers blocking a little bit, but still: here it is.
> 
> I hope I have been doing a good job showing that Darcy, this version at least, is more than capable of being manipulative. Part of this, too, was me wanting to show how Darcy's Political Science degree might be relevant to the plot.
> 
> Warnings: The Convergence Thickens (ie Thor 2 is now relevant to MCU); Implied Blackmail/Bribery/other 'House of Cards' type stuff;

Darcy was in the hotel room, early morning light peeking through the edges of the thick curtains, still closed despite it being closer to 9am than to 8am. It was a normal hotel room, though one of the nicer ones. It had the standard two queen beds, a bathroom, a closet, coffee pot, large television with nothing good on, and the other usual miscellanea.

She had to use Bruce to get Tony to back down on simply buying her a condo or house to stay at in DC. Bruce had finally managed to convince him that shitty hotels were a rite of passage for fledgling scientists like Darcy (“Ha ha,” she later said sarcastically to Bruce privately, “My salary is bigger than my IQ. Fledgling scientist my ass.”). Still, it worked, so Darcy went with it.

The brunette girl was glancing back and forth between her phone, her clothes that she had hung up in the hotel closet, and Jane. Darcy's hair, dark and still wet from her recent shower, rested heavily against the nape of her neck as she wondered if she should say something to Jane, who was manically typing on her laptop while mainlining coffee like it was going out of style.

She absolutely was not using her phone to distract herself from deciding on what to wear on a lunch date (“Is it actually a date? Like, he never said the word date,” Darcy fake sobbed to Clint over the phone) with Steve, at a small bistro that Jane had recommended. The lunch was literally hours away, and she was not contemplating her wardrobe. She would deny any such behavior ferociously.

“Holy shit, I’m Eric Bittle,” she said, out of nowhere.

A garbled, slurping inquisitive noise came from Jane at the desk that came in the hotel room.

“From that web comic about a cute, petite Southern boy who bakes and plays hockey. Well, not really.” Darcy was doing a piss-poor job of ignoring her limited choices in her closet for her meeting with Steve later that day. “I mean, it is about that stuff. I meant that I’m not really Eric Bittle. The baking thing, yeah. None of the rest of it. I guess that would make Steve the love interest, Jack.”

 _I could go out and buy something new for it._ There were also several thrift stores that she had identified being near the area that she had scoped out the moment she landed.

 _But what would that say about me?_ She would think.

A dismissive snort echoed through the room, originating from jane.

“Yeah, now that I have your attention, are you going to any of the closing sess,” she pronounced it ‘shesh’, “stuff? If so, you need to get a move on.” 

Darcy was happily skipping the affair, having bagged two of the three scientists she had set out to find. The third was somehow scared away when Darcy asked her the only interview question she had prepared, (“What are your thoughts on the fall of human kind and the liberation of a post-apocalyptic world from the kyriarchy?”)

Jane rose from her seat, stretching in a way that filled the room with the sound of popping joints and achy bones. Yet, she still somehow managed to keep her coffee, her fourth one already, from spilling a single drop.

“Sorry, just G-chatting with Erik. Looking over the designs for the gravimetric sensors,” the astrophysicist scoffed, to cut off Darcy when the girl opened her mouth, “and no, I won’t call them spikes. They’re delicate portal detecting equipment, not weapons.”

Darcy nodded along, “I will say, the blue space cube thingy definitely fucked his head up. But," she paused, like she was thinking of how to phrase the next sentence. "His work lately has been even more on point than normal.”

“Yeah, this is exactly what we need to finish our spatial-temporal defensive satellite array. We should have been paying more attention to gravity.” Jane, before quickly rolling her eyes, before making eye contact with the other woman, “Shut up, Darcy. That movie was awful.”

Darcy diligently looked back down to her phone, gasping as a character on her phone received a concussion. “I didn’t say anything, Boss Lady,” Darcy still used the term of endearment, since technically Jane worked for Darcy.

“Gimme a refill,” Jane wagged her cup at the girl. Darcy had confiscated the coffee pot and put it on her side of the room, to ensure Jane would not accidentally overdose. When there was no immediate reaction, she added a grudging, “Please.”

Darcy held out her free hand, towel still wrapped firmly around her after the shower, while still staring at her phone. At some point between glancing away from Jane’s hand to look back down at her phone and Jane passing the bland, white mug in her hand, they fumbled it.

“Fuck,” Darcy exclaimed, waiting to hear the thunk of empty mug and drops of coffee spill out.

No sound came.

Darcy down at the carpet, mug nowhere to be seen. She looked back up, watching as Jane’s eyes lit up like the 4th of July and Christmas had a love-child. It was a fire that burned in the heart of all astrophysicists.

“The space-time distortions have solidified into real wormholes!” Jane’s smile was frenzied. “Screw the closing session. I’m going to London to meet with Erik. Hopefully, he won’t be detained again by the time I get there. We need the data on the Convergence.”

Darcy watched as Jane packed all of her stuff faster than she had taken to unload it (which was already pretty darn fast). “Jane, your flight isn’t for another 8 hours,” Darcy pointed out.

Jane waved her hand, “Details.”

“Jane, this puts our predictive models off by more than two weeks,” Darcy said, as she was ignored. “None of the equipment is ready, Jane.” Hoping to give the woman a bit of a reality check.

Jane’s trip to London after the conference was intended to use their predicted leeway to work with Dr. Selvig to finalize working on the rod-like devices that would detect and, perhaps, manipulate wormholes to mitigate the effects that sudden spatial-temporal anomalies might generate.

 _There goes my UK version of the Dimensional Disaster and Relief plan_ , Darcy thought with a pout. Darcy had been writing up many such legislation and plans for different countries and cities around the world. She had only just finalized and sent the London office their version of the law and stipulations for implementation last week.

Despite this, Darcy was glad. The mug thing did lend credence to their prediction that the disturbances would spin around, sort of like water swirling down a drain, before concentrating on London (“The alignment of realm to realm will stir Yggdrasil, until the branches bend in unnatural shapes, and there is a storm running through the heart of each realm,” Thor explaining what he learned from his father).

Darcy closed her eyes, pulling up a mental visualization of the data and model she had built out for Jane. Purple for mathematical symbols, red for initial numbers and blue for new or projected data. The numbers swirled in her vision, as she reran the equations. They danced behind her eyelids in swirl, recalculating regressions in her head. Sometimes, if Darcy stayed in this kind of headspace for too long, she would get dizzy in real life.

“Factoring in distance from London, the relative size of a fissure needed to carry something the mass and size of the mug, I give us three days before it peaks. Four at the tops.” She made a mental note to have Jarvis confirm her numbers, later.

Jane continue to ignore her. Darcy noticed the exact moment that the scientist realized if she threw all of her clothes into the luggage without folding it, it would not fit. Jane switched tactics, changing to carefully but quickly folding everything.

Darcy took a moment, analyzing her situation, before she decided it was easier to give up on Jane when the woman was in this kind of mood. Instead, the young woman stood and headed to the bathroom to start blow drying her hair.

The harsh whine of the blow dryer (no, it wasn’t a Stark invention, that would just be ridiculous), and the heat seeping into her head, did wonders in calm her racing thoughts. Her mind quieted to the pitch of the hum of the device in her hand.

She pulled mentally pulled up the plans they already had in place to deal with Shield.

Without knowing the full extent of Shield’s breach of law (at the very least, ethical misconduct), around the Starks and the Avengers, their current strategy was to plan and build up alliances in major world governments until they were ready to do something more definitive. The UN, while important and technically housed authority over the WSC, was more or less ineffectual in directing world security. Everyone knew that the major world powers called the shots on the WSC, in spite of and rarely because of UN politics. However unfair or uncomfortable that made Darcy, it was the reality of the situation.

Darcy started some of her martial arts breathing exercises as well.

A mental picture, a map really, sketched out in her head. She was not as good with this kind of mental visualization as she was with her mathematical proofs and analyses. It had taken her years of practicing as an undergrad, desperate to write papers that she routinely procrastinated until the last minute, to build this connections between people, places and possibilities.

Little spider webs branched out behind her closed eyelids. Red strings, for opposition. Blue strings for allies. Purple for unconfirmed. The avengers, blue. Shield, red. Shield agents, dependent. President of Interpol, purple. The head of Scotland Yard, blue.

The Convergence was extremely likely to come with disruptions that would bring alien objects (e.g. rocks and soil) through the disturbances, and lead to the disappearance of a lot of Earth material. A smaller likelihood of alien lifeforms and technology coming through, and our own going out, existed. With the gravimetric devices in play, they should be able to prevent or reverse the disappearance of people, but smaller scale stuff would be nearly impossible. Like placing levies in a river without knowing how bad the flood would be.

She started running hypotheticals through her head, not unlike multiple imputation for statistical models with missing data. Averaging outcomes, conservative and liberal estimations of the extent of the Convergence, likelihood of certain government intervention, political and economic capital lost, politicians likely to lose their next elections due to the fall out, business competition in the area, NGOs in the area, public support gained for Stark Industries for helping reconstruction on damage they didn’t cause.

As she thought through her options, one thing became clear above everything. She realized that no matter how small the possibility was of actual life or technology coming through, Shield would get involved with the Convergence.

 _If Shield gets involved, they keep what they find. Like the Tesseract all over again. But if Stark Industries or the Avengers are already there, do they intervene or do they wait?_ Darcy thought. _No, they wait for it to be handled by others and, once finished, swoop in._

Darcy stopped her hair dryer and whipped out her contact list on her Stark phone. It rang twice before connecting. She activated the complete black-out protocol in her room, and hoped that Tony or Pepper didn’t kill her when they found out.

_They wouldn’t anticipate resistance or serious threats of withholding of resources, since it isn’t part of the normal pattern of cooperation or complicity._

“Hey, Rufus. It’s Darcy. I need you to drop everything. Executive Level eyes only.” She didn’t even stop to exchange her usual flirtations with the brit who headed Stark Europe from London.

He retightened his tie, he had a habit of loosening it when he thought he was going to flirt with a pretty gal, and went into all business mode with Darcy. The fact that he was able to do so was a big reason he still had a job.

“What do you need, Ms. Lewis?” Thankfully, he was in his home office after a lunch meeting, so he grabbed his laptop and began typing, sending messages to his Legal and Administrative heads. They were the only ones cleared, at the moment, to hear anything at the Executive Level.

Everyone in Stark Industries knew by then, when Darcy Lewis asked you for something, you damn well got it done. They were afraid of her, personally, after she so thoroughly blacklisted Hammer Tech spies from the tech sector that they couldn’t even use a landline to call in IT requests without critical systems failures. The complete dismantling and reassembling of the India branch under Darcy’s supervision, after she uncovered unacceptable levels of corruption there, had put the fear of Thor in them.

“Okay,” Darcy breathed out. “What’s the status of the Dimensional Disaster and Relief plan for Parliament?”

“On time, to be confirmed by the end of next week,” Rufus added, his heart rate ticking up, not knowing where the conversation was going. He prepared to head back to the physical office and have dinner ordered in. Assignments from high up tended to mean late nights.

“And can you modify it so that outside contractors (i.e. Stark Industries) responsible for clean-up be given legal rights to scavenge physical resources from the destroyed area?” Darcy added, thoughtfully, like her mind was not racing a mile a minute.

Rufus let out a sigh of relief, since that was a request that would not be that difficult to fulfill. “We could finagle the legal language. The Conservatives would like it, make it seem like not just a sink of public dollars, but stimulating local business and the economy through potential reconstruction. The Liberal Democrats will like it if we spin it as a part of our green energy initiative. The bigger problem will be equipping our local warehouses and subsidiaries to handle the influx.”

“Don’t worry about that just yet. Can you make that language stick to scavenging alien technology?” Darcy asked, sharply. “You know, sort of like recycling. But like, alien technology recycling.”

“If we add a stipulation that the contractor is responsible for disposing of unviable resources at their own cost. At the very least, we could make a case that the technology will be disposed. Make it harder to take it back from us.” Rufus bit back a groan, rubbing absently at the growing crows-feet at the corner of his eyes. “With international security involved, it has a chance of working but probably not.”

“Keep the stipulation if you want. What I want to know is - can you make it happen if I gave you complete freedom to beg, bribe, or blackmail as you see fit?” Darcy said, a smirk growing on her face.

Rufus closed his tired hazel eyes, desperate for a whiskey but cutting back since his stomach started growing, centimeter by centimeter, at the same rate his hair line started receding. “Yes. It is possible. Same two week deadline?”

“Now,” Darcy said briskly into the telephone. “Since that’s not possible, what can you make happen?”

Rufus Williams (Mastering out of his Ph.D. program from the School of Technology – Cambridge), did not sigh. No matter how much he wanted to. “How do you feel about The Rt Hon Mark Harper MP?”

“Ugh, damn that beautiful, beautiful man.” Darcy groaned. “How soon with or without his support as the Chief Whip?”

“Two, maybe three days with him on our side. A week, at the earliest, without,” the brit said, smoothly. He started emailing some of his direct reports, organizing to off-load less critical projects onto them. He would give them a generous bonus this year, and was going to charge it to Darcy’s accounts.

Darcy contemplated. “He owes me a favor.” She had cleaned up digital evidence of his extra-marital dalliances in return for an open ended favor, of equal value, to be returned at a later date. She had been collecting many of such favors since the whole Shield business came to light weeks ago.

“Not one this big. We’ll end up in his debt either way,” Rufus clarified.

“Fuck it. Give the Chief Whip what he wants.” She begrudgingly conceded. “I’ll send you my personal account information if you need _discretionary funds_. If he tries to fuck us over, remind him that I have Pepper Potts on my side. Yeah?”

Darcy hung up viciously, immediately restarting her hair dryer to finish off her thick, brown locks. Darcy watched Jane slam out of the room, having completely ignored everything Darcy just did, with only a wave goodbye and a gesture that Darcy knew meant ‘wear the strappy green dress with Steve today.’

“That girl,” Darcy sighed out.

Darcy was sure in that moment, the same surety that a first round draft pick has at their first big game, that she had figured out a way to get the information they needed from Shield without having to involve Steve either way. If it also put her into a position to force Tony to allow Steve to be read in on the current Shield situation, despite his presence away from the Tower while in DC, well … That was just a bonus.

 _And if they don’t anticipate resistance, they won’t recognize a diversion when they see one_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The webcomic references (hockey knowledge not necessary) are to a webcomic that I simply adore: http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/


	9. Where Relationship Conversations are Context for Spy Subtext

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy and Steve talk.
> 
> Mostly, I love writing Darcy and Steve being cute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey people,
> 
> Sorry for a new delay, the new chapter was harder to write, I got stuck with this chapter because this is the last one before some more serious stuff (in my head) goes down. 
> 
> Plus, I have interviewed like crazy these last few weeks and I have a new job that I'll be starting soon. Hopefully, that doesn't change my once-a-week timeline for updating the fic, but please stick with me if chapters start taking a little bit longer.
> 
> Also, someone fabulous took their free time to beta-read this! Woo-hoo! Many many thanks to the wonderful [AngelicSodaCan](http://angelicsodacan.tumblr.com/), whose tumblr you should totally check out. AngelicaSodaCan deserves nothing but the best things.

The air smelled like cilantro and fresh bread. The bistro Jane recommended was well lit, soft lighting coming from above. The windows were blocky, framed in the same dark wood used in the bar and tables, that allowed in some natural light and glimpses of people scurrying past, yet it felt somehow closed off. A slice of privacy and subtle, delicious scents in the bustle of the day. It felt more like a renovated home than a restaurant.

Darcy was standing in a pair of casual jeans, her favorite and rattiest pair, and a National Women’s Hockey League t-shirt. A New York Riveters logo scrawled proudly across her chest, despite the somewhat stylishly casual environment of the restaurant. Underneath it all was her underarmour running long-sleeve, and her peacoat held draped over a forearm.

The last three guys she had tried to date seriously, or the closest approximation to serious that was possible considering she was often drowning in work or nursing injuries, had ended disastrously. There was Peter, who was serious about getting a Masters in Public Health and seemed to be cool with her crazy lifestyle. Instead, he tried selling her story to gossip blogs (currently unemployed and having difficulties, what with the fact his social media passwords kept changing unexpectedly). The dude-bro Mark, bendy and gorgeous, was easily intimidated by assassins. Which was basically a deal-breaker in Darcy’s life, as it was. The pleasantly-boring-but-hunky accountant Maurice, who got weird the first time Darcy’s face showed up in news media (“Though that Huffington Post article about gender equality on the Avengers was da bomb, yo,” Darcy hissed out upon Maurice’s meek  request to go their separate ways).

All of this within the last year, none of them lasting beyond a fourth date. She decided in a fit, with the warmth of recently dried hair in her face, that “Whatever.” Exactly that. Just whatever.

The young woman was waiting by the entrance, in front of the hostess’s station. Though it  wasn’t beyond her means, either financially or politically, to get past  that silly plebian custom of having to wait for your  entire party to arrive before being seated, Darcy liked to keep things like this simple. _Don’t throw your weight around, unless it is important. Don’t cause a scene, unless they really need a kick in the balls. Don’t wear fuchsia in public, it’s  the worst color._ All easy to follow.

Steve Rogers arrived to lunch 15 minutes late with a sheepish grin on his face. Darcy could see the faint hint of bruises at the edges of his hands, likely from practicing with his vibranium shield, near the opening of the sleeves of his dark blue coat. His face was hidden beneath a baseball cap and sunglasses despite the overcast March day.

“You know that sunglasses _and_ a baseball cap are a little overkill?” Darcy asked, unknowingly releasing tension in her shoulders at seeing the casual jeans and slightly scuffed sneakers on Steve’s feet.

“Like using two methods of contraception? Just to be sure,” Steve asked with a wicked grin. At Darcy’s flabbergasted expression, he giggled gleefully but quietly, eyes flitting quickly off to the side to avoid eye contact.

“I don’t even know what to say to that,” Darcy said, straightening her posture. “Weren’t most modern birth control devices before your time?”

Steve shrugged, “Let's just say the Shield nurses are as thorough as they are frightening. Especially when it comes to locker room talk.”

The locker room was particularly illuminating on modern culture. Especially when Natasha or Tony were present and warm from steam or exertion, who often said something out of the blue meant to shock Steve and upset his delicate sensibilities. It might have unsettled him, for the first few days, that some of the Shield bases he frequented early on in his defrosting were so small that there was only one locker room. It might have even confused him the first few times he had been corrected that Level 3 Agent Sanders was a ‘she’, but just hadn’t started her hormone treatments.

Very little about Captain America was delicate anymore.

“Bravo, good sir. Troll Rogers strikes again. Trogers? Trollmerica?” She nodded to herself, hunching her coat close to her chest once more and gestured for Steve to follow her to their table.

Though she had waited in the front for Steve, that didn’t mean she was dumb. She had dropped a couple of fifties to ensure they got the table she wanted. She knew, from t knowledge born of carefully observing the unconscious habits of the people closest to her, that Steve would want a booth in a corner that would give him line of sight to entrances and exits. A position without any clear lines of sight from the windows for snipers.

Darcy enjoyed the simplicity of the brunch. Awkward perusal of menus that she didn’t put together herself. Waiting for the server to list the specials, but never quite being sure where one special ended and another began, as the server mumbled out ingredients without enunciating so all of it blurred together in a jumble. The quiet clink of half-started conversations, interrupted by water glasses being refilled and Steve’s eyes darting about the place, faux-casual but still relaxed in her presence.

She had him laughing into his salmon benedict as she recounted her, redacted, retelling of her one-upping Coulson’s little Team-That-Could. She chuckled around her own french fries and garlic aioli, the spicy undertone of chili sharp on her tongue.

Quick as a thief, she used her fork to steal a piece of asparagus off of his plate when he was looking away. He eyed her  fondly as he watched her grin triumphantly, and Darcy’s knees, thankfully not currently supporting her weight, went wobbly.

The moment thinned, and stretched. Something broke the easy camaraderie of the moment and, for the life of her, Darcy could not pinpoint what did it when she tried to review the conversation mentally.

“There’s a lot you’re not saying,” he said solemnly, carefully, over the quiet background. The late afternoon was gradually turning the interior of the restaurant darker.

The volley hit dead center, a quake in her chest, but she didn’t let it show on her face. She smiled a deceptively gentle smile. Darcy had known the moment they walked in here, that she would be pushing her luck by continuing to rely on Stark spy tech to hide another deadly serious conversation in public setting. Repeated use almost guaranteed detection and adaptation from their enemies. Instead, forcing her breath to stay even and steady, she firmly decided that she could do without. She, perhaps naively, decided that she could have a pleasant meal with Steve, keeping it casual, and avoid unpleasant truths or the need for misdirection for just one meal.

She was wrong, of course. Steve, peripherally in her life for close to a year but solidly in it for the last few months, did not know Darcy the best. But he knew enough.

“Maybe it just isn’t the right time to say it,” she wasn’t sure if it made sense, if it communicated what she wanted it to. She hoped it did. _Drop it,_ she thought.

“Will there be a right time to say it,” he said, not quite an accusation. Feasibly, a question.

She raised a sculpted eyebrow, “You could just ask. You know that right?” She waved him off with her fork, a turkey sausage still speared on it, before he could respond. “I will either answer or I won’t.”

“Will I get a straight answer?” He queried. There was something dark beneath the words, some unfocused anger, quick, like a cat catching a bird in midflight. The ice may have slid off his skin, but it was still in his bones.

She snickered at the comment, “Not much of that going around, with the Avengers.” When he didn’t smile, though she thought perhaps he wanted to, she took a moment to ponder before adding, “I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately lied to you.”

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought this up now.” He cast his eyes down, taking a loud breath in and letting it out from his nose. He shook his head, like trying to clear water out of your ear after a swim, and  examined the faint callouses against his palm from practicing with his shield (it was the only thing that could get the callouses to stick for more than a few days on his clear skin).

“Steve,” she said, sharply. Forcing his eyes to hers. “You are allowed to ask.”

“We’re friends, right?” He said, assessing. Slipping into the careful skin he crafted to deal with reporters and schmoozing donors.

“At the very least, Steve-o,” she affirmed, silently pointing to the server, gesturing for him that she needed a refill on her diet coke. “You’re an Avenger.”

She hoped he understood that being an Avenger meant more to her right now than being her friend. The Avengers were the little home she built, made of baked goods and emotionally damaging conversations, on top of a pile of egos and exceptionally talented individuals who also didn’t play well with others.

“I’ve been hearing a lot of gossip about you and Natasha in the locker rooms. Said you two caused a bit of a ruckus this weekend.” He said, thinking of Rumlow, a dower-faced man with a strong work ethic that showed promise as leader of the STRIKE team.

The _What are you doing and why haven’t I been read in?_ was clear and evident beneath the remark.

She honestly never really anticipated the little deception she was pulling with Natasha to make the rounds this quickly and this effectively. They had only been planning for the alphabet agencies to go with the deception with Natasha. They had, she would think, misjudged Shield gossip networks to other national security agencies.

Darcy forced an easy chuckle out of her lips. “You know the trouble the spy-sassins and I tend to get into. No more or less than usual. Actually, less this time around.”

_No, we were not doing anything that necessarily needed your attention._

He nodded, something thawing briefly in his gaze. “Okay. So.” He began, harsh stops and awkward pauses suffused through his limbs. “I don’t know how to do this.” He said, stroking his jaw softly with the palm of his right hand, rubbing away imaginary food on his face. “Asking about these kinds of things.”

“I’ve spent too much time wading through the worst of the emotional bullshit of all of you, Steve. When I say you can ask, I mean you can ask.” She said, a note of sharpness entering her voice. “I can’t promise to answer you fully, but I promise to answer you honestly.”

There was no subtext there. A little bit proud of herself, she had managed to find a way to say exactly what she meant.

 _I don’t know how Natasha does this all the time. It’s exhausting_ , she thought to herself. She watched the thoughts flit through Steve’s eyes, the subtle shifts, highlighting the faintest rasp of stubble just under his jaw.

“Is something going on with you and Natasha?” He asked, immediately stuffing his mouth with the last of the food on his plate. Giving himself an excuse not to say more, not to give too much away. To hopefully suppress the blushes that just seem to happen around Darcy Lewis spontaneously.

She let a teasing smirk dance across her lips - she even believed this one was genuine.

“No.” It was a simple truth. Even if Shield were watching right now, it was a small truth that damaged none of her plans, none of her contingencies, as they currently stood.

“Oh, okay.” He answered, awkward scratching at the back of his neck. A pressure, an honest one he was surprised to find, let up in his gut. Reassured.

“If we were, would that have been a problem?” She let her voice carry the warm promise despite her eyes, still locked on his, being still and serious. “Last time I checked, we haven’t exactly defined anything here. No labels, or boundaries, or anything. Is that a conversation we need to have, Mr. Rogers?”

 _Yes, there is something going on. Yes, we can talk about it_.

The part of Darcy that would have been in awe of being able to have an entire conversation based on subtext alone, that part died a slow death in a New Mexico desert when a small town burnt to the ground. The rest of her was smug trepidation. The little paranoia scratching at the back of her throat had become a constant, if strangely comforting, presence in her life these last weeks.

“No, no problem at all Ms. Lewis.” He shook his head, mollified. He fought not to let out a relieved breath, glad that (from what he understood of the conversation) Darcy always meant to let him know. “I guess I was just wondering when _you_ thought we needed to have this conversation.”

“Hmmm,” she thought, tapping against his lips. “Can we just keep this chill, for now? Give it a couple of weeks, see if this is working out.”

His lips tightened, so subtly that Darcy wasn’t even sure if she was sure she saw anything. Steve, unknown to her and conceivably to himself, did not do well with uncertainty.

“Let’s say, I promise that we’ll have that conversation before we make it past third base. And considering how often I think of your stupidly pretty face, I promise you it won’t take that long to get me on board. A home run, before the month is out, if I had my way.”

He nodded, once, sharply, picking up his glass of water. Darcy cackled gleefully at watching the full body blush start from his neck, spilling upwards and outwards, until she could even see faint hints of it at his biceps. The flush of warmth caused, Darcy would think, by the fact that Steve just realized that they had been using having a ‘labeling their relationship’ conversation to talk spy work. And that she had, in fact, just used sexual innuendo (no matter how honest she was about it) to let him know that she would tell him everything within the next month.

It sped up her timeline somewhat.

Thankfully, Darcy was adaptable.

“Alright then, Stevie boy. I think you might have heard my rant that gender is performative. Did you hear my one against the stupid fucks who assume a binary for sexuality or romanticality, rather than the spectrums they so obviously are? Let me tell you about the modern era, where I and many others have zero fucks to give about anyone’s relationship status, poly/mono/open or anything really. Stop me when you get confused,” she said, silently chuckling at the gobsmacked, but amused (adoring?) look on his face.

She spent the rest of the meal chucking french fries around accidentally as she impassionedly explained. Her favorite part about dining with Steve, she learned in the next 45 minutes or so, was that he was always up for splitting a dessert. If anything, the two extra stacks of pancakes (red velvet and peanut butter maple) were more for Steve than Darcy, who had to fight to get a taste from the bottomless pit that was the tall, blond man.

“Hey,” Steve interrupted her, laying a gentle hand over hers on the table. He squeezed it, briefly. It struck him, strangely, that her hand was one of the smallest he had ever held. Neither the brute roughness of a soldier or graceful strength of a spy. Just smooth. “Thanks,” he said, letting her hand go as they returned to their meal.

“Of course, Steve,” she said, bright smile and mirth dancing in her eyes, “any time.”


	10. Too Much Work, Not Enough Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all,
> 
> Sorry for the later chapter. I just started a new job and I had my birthday and time just slipped away from me. I swear this story will get written. I love writing it far too much to just give it up.
> 
> Many thanks again to [AngelicSodaCan](http://angelicsodacan.tumblr.com/), the bestest beta anyone could ask for. Any mistakes left in the work are all my fault.

Darcy was standing in the Tower elevator, listing sideways against the wall. The light, normally soft and forgiving, seemed to stab at her eyes in a steady pulse. The early Monday morning was hitting the young woman hard.

“Would you like your agenda for the day, Ms. Lewis?” Jarvis asked, quietly. Darcy had entered  the elevator, only to stand without moving for several long moments. The sound of measured breathing was the only other sound in the enclosed space, the kind one might expect a boxer to use before they enter the ring for their first big fight.

Darcy paused, letting the wall support her weight, as she felt a night of poor rest take its toll on her legs’ ability to support her body.

“Break it down for me, Optimus Prime. Start with personal, then move to professional, and end it with anything Avengers related.” Darcy forced herself to mumble over a heavy tongue.

Jarvis, betraying none of the worry that had become his default for the people in his charge, proceeded on. “Outside of Stark business, you have Professor Kazimark from MIT that has been calling, entreating you to enroll for your Ph.D. after your most recent work in his class required for your MBA/MS degree. The New Yorker wants an interview for Women’s History Month, on a special for women in STEM. Also, my internal notifications have prompted me to remind you that you deactivated your online dating profiles two months ago and that you should …” Jarvis gave a digital cough before he played Darcy’s request back in her own voice, “’Give it another go, buckarino. Perhaps they won’t all suck this time.’”

Darcy did not have the energy to even pound her own head against the wall, but she was sorely tempted to do so. Darcy had given Jarvis control over her profiles, sure that if she held onto them herself, she would just compulsively try to pursue guys, each of them being a bigger disappointment than the last. She was regretting that choice at the moment.

“I should never have let you take the profiles.” Darcy mumbled out. “Keep the dating apps deactivated until things are settled with Steve one way or another,” she said, strangely adult but also vaguely petulant about the situation. She was only 22, gods damn it, and she figured it shouldn’t be that damn hard. “Put a phone call on the agenda for the New Yorker. Keep ignoring Kazimark.” Her tone, clipped and professional, left no room for Jarvis to give her any shit about what her personal life was like.

Not that it was much of a personal life.

Jarvis continued on, unruffled, with giving her Stark Industries updates. “Ten proposals from normal R&D for joint projects. I have ordered them based on our formerly defined criteria of importance. All of which is waiting in your email queue, Ms. Lewis.” To be fair, their criteria was mostly danger and economies of scale.

When Darcy nodded her thanks, Jarvis continued on, “Three conference calls with different branch heads, scheduled for this afternoon, each thirty minutes in length. There are eighteen expense reports waiting for your review to Finance. End of Quarter updates to the Board are due by the end of next week. I have taken the liberty of blocking off an hour in the afternoon where the two of us can review them. Also, a Mr. Williams from the Britain Office has been calling hourly saying he has urgent business with you.”

Darcy desperately wanted coffee, but organizing her agenda was immediately important. She simply waved Jarvis to continue on.

“Agent Barton wishes to schedule dinner. He promised to make lasagna.”  _ Ohhh … bribery lasagna. Not good _ . “Ms. Potts has blocked has requested your presence in her office from 3 to 5pm. She has not indicated what for. Mr. Stark has hacked your calendar and placed a lunch hold, location set to be Sir’s private residence, from 11:30am until 12:30pm.”

Jarvis listed off the last of her day’s agenda with a hint of trepidation. In all honesty, the artificial man had been triaging the worst of Darcy’s responsibilities for the past several days. Even before Shield-gate, neither of them had truly had a day off. Darcy taking the weekend off, doing almost none of the more sensitive work remotely for fear of being overseen, had thrown off their equilibrium.

Their normally ruthlessly efficient schedule was all a-jumble, and it meant that Darcy had to walk into a mountain of work to help Jarvis clean up the mess. Just thinking of it exhausted the young woman. Also, she hadn’t slept that well the past evening. An unwelcome but increasingly familiar state for the lady.

Jarvis and Darcy had a slew of half-completed Stark Phone apps and games sitting idly on their network for those nights that neither of them could force themselves to relax.

“Jay, my man,” Darcy whimpered out, rubbing at her eyes fiercely in order to try to force herself awake on the early Monday morning. Her hair was thick and humid against her neck, the smell of her normally pleasant kiwi-scented shampoo was cloying against her nose. She was in the elevator, demanding to be taken to the first floor. Though she still maintained the illusion of having her own place in Queens, she spent 9 out of 10 nights at the tower proper. “Fine, let them all know I’ll be there. No need to hack back my calendar from them.”

She took a deep breath, exhaling tightly through a clenched jaw. “You know what. No. I’m going to Starbucks, right now. I don’t care what that says about me. Buy me fifteen minutes before you let the hoards descend,” Darcy bit out, exhausted, into the elevator.

“Hmm …” Jarvis hummed out, contemplating softly to himself. He started running the examination of possibilities to fulfill Darcy’s request. A wicked idea crossed his artificial mind, when he used some of his threat-neutralization code to analyze the request.

Somewhere deep in the Tower, Jarvis threaded through the deepest parts of it like a vein of mithril in Moria, began subtly sowing chaos. Showers broke, doors ‘accidentally’ short circuited and locked people in her room. The calendars on several people were hacked and changed to later times without notice. Dum-E was sent to break the coffee makers in the biology department, and You failed to nudge Pepper out of a minor call with her estate attorney.

“You have closer to an hour now, Ms. Lewis,” Jarvis said, self-satisfaction and cleverness positively dripping in his tone.

Darcy’s thousand-watt smile was more than enough for Jarvis to feel completely justified for the temporary madness he was sowing both inside and outside the Tower.

To be honest, she missed her little morning rituals with Jarvis in the elevator. Having that moment to take a breath and prepare herself for the day. Some small part of her would be infinitely glad for Jarvis, the best thing that had happened to her in weeks.

“You’re the best, Jay,” she said, squaring her shoulders back to exit the lobby, letting the early March sun pound into her eyes.

With an indefinable fondness in his synthetic voice, “Of course, Ms. Lewis.”

-

Dr. Phillis Monroe and Dr. Jacob Wagner, both mid-thirties and dark-haired, non-descript biologists, were sitting in front of Darcy’s desk with the same air of a high-school student having a disciplinary meeting with their principal. It was 8:45am, exactly, and Darcy was watching them behind her chunky framed glasses with a critical air.

“I hope you realize, I know exactly how much you’ve had to blackmail, bribe and outright intimidate the rest of Special Projects to block off this meeting.” Darcy was secretly impressed, but she wasn’t prepared to give anything away to them just yet. Jarvis kept Darcy appraised of personnel issues that needed her attention. “So, cut the bullshit and just tell me why you’re here.”

The only reason that Darcy entertained their shenanigans was that the two of them were the ones that developed the hair dye she used at her Stark Gala prank. The fact that they were damn fine microbiologists was also important, but secondary in this instance.

Phillis (“Call me Lils”) smiled brightly. “You have to admit, the threat of ultra-powered laxatives against Dr. Foster’s scientists was hilarious.” Darcy had wondered what caused Dr. Morris and Dr. Keating to give up their meeting with her about increasing their funding.

Jacob (“Call me Waggy”) raised a hand for a high-five with a grave face. When Lils delivered the man a firm high-five, he gave Darcy his full attention, murky green eyes dead serious. “We need a head of Biology in Special Projects.”

Darcy narrowed her eyes. “You realize there are no heads in Special Projects. Technically, I’m the only head.” Her voice had gone slightly frosty, wondering if this was going to be the first major challenge of her authority in her job. In fact, she had been expecting it from the very beginning and was more surprised that it might have taken this long for something to come up.

Lils interjected, “In theory, yes. In practice, having Dr. Foster, Dr. Banner and Dr. Stark in the division, means there are clear delineations amongst the rank and file.” Lils clarified, suddenly much more tense after the initial reaction they got from Darcy. All of the scientists were secretly a little afraid of the petite brunette.

They had seen her cackle at explosions and deliver a bright pink dildo with a solemn, almost reverent, face.

“Without a biologist at the head of our projects who is at the same caliber as Foster, Banner or Stark, we’re basically playing catch up every step of the way.” Waggy explained, sour-faced. “When Stark and Banner destroyed three months worth of cell samples when they rerouted our power to their project, that was it. We just had to make up for it. The same thing would never have happened to Dr. Foster’s lab. Or yours, if you had one.”

Darcy’s back stiffened. It was an exercise in will to let her jaw loosen so that it was no longer tense enough to crack walnuts. “Are you implying that I am playing favorites? Because if you are, you both have been here since I started in this role and could have said something sooner.”

Darcy didn’t have the same chip-on-her-shoulder pride that a lot of the people around her did, but that didn’t mean she had none. She was a damn fine science wrangler if she did say so herself. And she did. Often. Not to mention the fact that she could murder a piece of code in her sleep.

“No, that’s not what we’re saying.” Lils clarified, clearly taking the role of good cop between the two. Her warm brown eyes softened a touch, Darcy reminding her of her own younger sister. “It’s just that you can’t be everywhere. You have to put out every fire the Science!Trio starts. It’s not surprising that you wouldn’t necessarily notice that the bio-physicists under Banner hoard the best electron microscopes. Or that Foster’s people steal the best coffee, claiming Jane’s caffeine addiction as the reason, and none of the other biologists …” she paused.

The woman, hair pulled back in a no nonsense ponytail, eyed Darcy and contemplated her response. Waggy did not roll his eyes, but everyone in the room could tell that it was a barely resisted impulse.

“They are too chicken-shit to say anything about it,” he bit out, clearly unimpressed by his compatriots. Lils smacked him softly against his arm.

Darcy took the top off her iced, grande, five-shot, soy milk, white chocolate mocha, and took a huge gulp. The sweet coffee taste was soft on her tongue, calming her flayed patience.

“So, let me get this straight. You want a biologist you think the other top-dog scientists in the labs respect, and will sooth the middle-child complex all y’all seem to be having about your place in Special Projects.” Darcy stated, clearly and voice devoid of amusement. Lils and Waggy both blushed.

_ Well, when Darcy said it that way, it did sound a bit stupid, _ they would think.

Still, they nodded, as earnest as was possible for the two middle-aged divorcees who cared more about genetics than making a relationship work. Darcy ran the numbers in her head. There was a lot of funding for Special Projects, but it wasn’t unlimited. And there was no way Darcy was going to let her people force her to ask for more funding for their department in only the first year.

Moreover, other than the early debacle when Darcy first started, personnel turnover was incredibly low. In fact, they only just had one biologist leave the department, and only because she recently got pregnant and wanted settle down as a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. So she technically also had one HR-approved FTE for Special Projects.

With this in mind, she made a decision.

“To attract someone of the quality you are suggesting and fund their specific projects, I’d have to slash your individual’s budgets. If you get the other biologists to agree to accept a 75% reduction in their discretionary funding, and get me a list of five names by the end of the day, you have yourself a deal.”

A dull throb started behind her eyelids. Pepper was going to be so mad when she realized Darcy just gave her department permission to recruit another Mad Scientist.

Waggy’s thick eyebrows dropped down in relief. “Helen Cho,” was all he said.

“We’ll get you four more by 5pm today,” the female scientist stated. “And the other biologists will agree,” she assured Darcy darkly.

Darcy nodded, trying her best to look regal, reasonable, and all those other adult-like things.

The impulse passed quickly. “Now get the fuck out of my office,” she said simply, channeling Nick Fury in that moment, while slurping at the dregs of coffee at the bottom of her cup.

The moment the door closed gently behind the fleeing scientists, Darcy let her neck muscles give up the fight of keeping her head up. The back of her head thumped against her extremely comfortable office chair.

She eyed the ceiling, pondering at Jarvis. “Fuck,” she said simply.

“I will have a comprehensive report on Ms. Cho available to you by tonight,” Jarvis said simply. “I am afraid I am currently a tad busy with digital security inspections of all of Stark Industries. Ms. Potts has ordered it a priority, I’m afraid.”

Darcy just nodded at the pronouncement. She was only just bringing up some of the expense reports that Jarvis always seemed to ‘never have time to do’ and always somehow ended up on her desk. She was only just opening Tony’s recent slew of requests for thousands of dollars worth of taffeta in various colors. The ‘Expense Purpose’ section simple said, “For Reasons.”

She groaned faintly. Before the full breadth of the groan managed to escape past her lips, a steady knock came from her office door. She whispered out frantically, “Shit, Jay-meister. I thought I had 30 minutes before I had another meeting.”

“Hello, Darcy,” came a quiet, unassuming male voice from the other side of the door. Darcy rubbed at the delicate skin between her eyes, nudging the glasses out of her way quickly.

“Come on in, Bruce,” she called out clearly.


	11. Taking a Left Turn at Albaquerque

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all,
> 
> Sorry for the later chapter (again!!!!). The new job and early morning runs (trying to run a half marathon this summer), has eaten up all of my time. Expect more updates, folks. Stay with me.
> 
> Many thanks again to [AngelicSodaCan](http://angelicsodacan.tumblr.com/), the bestest beta anyone could ask for. Any mistakes left in the work are all my fault.

Bruce sat in the office chair, eyes closed, head tilted to feel the slight warmth of the light against his right ear. His hair had been getting a touch long again, he could feel the tips of it start to tickle at the shell of his ear.

Underneath his breath - breath that was in a perpetual state of forced calm in the same manner as his emotional balance - he could almost hear Darcy’s heartbeat. When he stood on the precipice between emotional chaos and calm, when he could feel the Hulk like a second heartbeat against his neck, he could sometime get glimpses of the skewed perception through which the Hulk saw the world. Sounds became sharper, harsher. Smells, somehow richer.

He was not prepared to be where he was, and it still boggled his mind that he was there at all.

“I wanted to talk to you before Tony or Pepper,” he said simply, breaking the long silence between the pair.

Had Darcy not been looking for it, she doubted she would have seen the shrewd look that passed across Bruce’s normally peaceful face. A look that was as practical as it was afraid.

“What do you need, Bruce?” She asked, straight forward, and foregoing one of her myriad of nicknames she had for the people in her life.

His mouth pursed, like he was weighing his words, but it was an awkward quirk that twisted the scientists rather relative plain face into something vaguely sour.

“Okay then,” he gave her the full weight of his stare, something uncurling underneath his eyes. “Personal privacy protocols, Jarvis. Bruce Banner, Echo-7-Hotel-9-Juliet.”

Though there was no outward change, Darcy now knew that the only ones listening to this conversation were the two currently in the room, particularly that Jarvis would be locked out.

“I need you to help me deal with the Hulk,” he said, in a tone that was as bland as it was anti-climactic. Though the implications of it were anything but. Darcy’s heart started beating harshly in her chest.

“Of course, Bruce,” Darcy said with a decisive tone. “You know I’d do anything to help out you and the big guy. I know you’ve been wanting to see if we can recreate the conditions from the Canadian woods. I’m  _ super  _ sorry that things,” she waved her hand in the air, unsuccessfully covering the scope of ‘things’ that had been getting in the way of other equally pressing matters in the pair’s lives, “have been wonky lately.”

Bruce smiled, a small, controlled smile. One that was, at parts, appreciative of the young  woman’s efforts and a little exasperated at Darcy not understanding the full scope of what, exactly, he was asking.

“I appreciate that, Darcy. I really do,” there was a ‘but’ the size of the empire state building implied in his words though never said. “What I’m asking for is VERONICA.”

Darcy’s lips, bare of lipstick that she often had no time for so only reserved for special occasions, were a worried pink line, the faint edge of red marks and peeling skin from the dual combination of dry Winter days and the worried edge of her teeth.

“He told you about that, did he?” was Darcy’s bland response.

She remembered the night she heard about the Mark XLIV, the dark edge of panic and nightmare behind her eyelids, as one of the best night’s sleeps she had gotten as she listened to Tony in his most open and honest as he talked about his Iron Man suits. She saw what he wanted her to see, his care and devotion to making things that he think would benefit the people he loves.

All without saying the words, of course.

So the fact that Bruce knew about it, but Darcy knew the suit had not gone into production, in part because of the  _ clean slate _ he promised Pepper about the suits after the fiasco with Aldrich Killian and, the other part, because of the (until only recently) nebulous status of the threesome’s relationship.

Darcy already had an inkling where this was going and she was not happy. Not happy at all.

“He told you about it but he won’t build it after the video in the woods,” she said, not quite sure if she was right but recognizing from the slant of Bruce’s shoulders that she had hit the mark dead on. She scrunched up her nose in disappointed understanding. “And let me guess, Pepper agrees with you but you know she wouldn’t approve of moving forward with  _ anything _ without consensus. Since she’s mature that way.”

Bruce, if his hair had been the same length as it was on a Manhattan day in a destroyed street, would have hidden his eyes behind the curly length. Instead, he glanced past Darcy’s shoulder, looking at the one-on-one pictures she had of all the Avengers on her wall.

Just over her shoulder was a picture of Bruce, the left side of his face smooshed onto a keyboard he had fallen asleep on after 48 hours without sleep. If his eyes weren’t closed, it would have looked like he was staring directly at the camera. Darcy, a gleeful and manic look on her face, was stooped over him awkwardly, arm still somewhat in the picture, as she snapped a selfie of the pair. Bruce had a copy of this photograph, carefully hidden in his wallet with the three other photos he allowed himself to take everywhere.

But that wasn’t the photo he was staring at. He was staring at the one immediately next to it.

Darcy was standing her full height of 5’3”, face ruddy with the cold and teeth as white as the Winter snow all around her, face highlighted and framed by the dark winter cap she was wearing. The picture was clear, but the background of trees and snow were out of focus, all you could see behind Darcy, standing almost twice the size of the small woman, was a large, violently green man, face twisted in confusion, as he held up two fingers awkward, though his palm was faced towards himself instead of outward. Eyes focused on nothing in particular, not knowing that Agent Coulson was recording him through a long-range scope rifle from across the clearing.

Bruce pulled in air through gritted teeth.

“You’re the only one who has access to Tony’s schematics and the official authority to approve production using Stark resources in a way that neither Pepper nor Tony would look into. It would be easy enough for you to commission it, officially, as a backup satellite for the wormhole detection array going live at the end of the month.” He said this with the same calm a mountain has before a single pebble starts an avalanche.

He had obviously been giving it a lot of thought. To be honest, Darcy even knew that he was right.

The problem with this scenario, in Darcy’s unfortunate opinion, was that Darcy had so many balls in the air she hadn’t been sharing with the class, she was afraid she was going to miss a catch and fumble the touchdown.

Okay, so metaphors weren’t exactly Darcy’s strongest suit.

“You’re forgetting about Jarvis,” Darcy said, deflecting the conversation somewhat, trying to buy herself sometime to think.

Bruce shook his head, “No, I’m not.” He paused, spelling it out, with an eyebrow that was vaguely smirky, “Sibling loyalty.”

Darcy looked somewhat startled. She wondered if Bruce found out how she covered for Jarvis when he decided to hack into production studios to get Darcy the unreleased versions of all the top artists. Or when he accidentally crashed the FCC website, when they were playing hack-tag that one time.

“Whatever you heard, that NSA website breach was definitely the Rising Tide,” she said, unconvincingly.

She snapped her mouth shut, then continued on without giving him a chance to respond.

“Bruce,” though it was only just his name, he could feel the weight of sentences underlying it. “The last thing I want to do is get in the middle of your relationship. Especially in a way this underhanded. You’d be risking a lot, perhaps everything, if I went through with this. You realize that, right?”

“The promise of a learning Hulk changed a lot for me, Darcy. How I thought about myself, how I thought about this … curse.” He gave her the full, overwhelmingly sad, weight of his gaze. “But I cannot live with more destruction on my hands. The guarantee of others safety has always been more important than my personal happiness. It has to be.”

She weighed her options in her head, letting them sit in silence for several long heartbeats, before nodding her head.

“I’ll get VERONICA in the air,” she said. Bruce’s soft smile, the lifting weight of relief, was well worth the promise.

As Bruce left the office (“Anubis’s balls, man, get some sleep,” she said to his retreating back), she was very glad that he never asked her to promise him  _ how _ she intended to get the behemoth Hulkbuster into operation.

She had honestly thought people would realize by now that Darcy was a wascally wabbit.

“Hey Jarvis, you back yet, buddy?” She asked to the ceiling, spinning softly in her swivel chair.

“Yes,” he said. “While I know it would normally be inappropriate to ask after a conversation done in privacy mode, I feel compelled to make sure if I should prepare for any explosions, murder or kidnapping attempts.”

She twisted her arms in a huff, “This only happens to me because you don’t have a body. Just watch. I’m going to laugh, laugh gleefully, the first time we have to rescue  _ your  _ behind from a digital kidnapping attempt.”

“Indeed, Ms. Lewis,” he drawled sarcastically.

“Now,” she said, rubbing her hands together slowly, using the methodical motion to map out her thoughts, “how do you feel about doing something that will  _ probably _ piss Tony off, but almost definitely be good for him.”

While Jarvis did have some protocols for laughter developed, their attempts to reproduce human laughter had been turning out more creepy than anything. If they were perfected, he would have been laughing at the moment.

“Need you ask, Ms. Lewis?” he chirped back, gleefully.

“Okay, so Tony’s almost definitely going to forget about our lunch plans, if he’s working on the Convergence Project at all with Jane in London. So, turn off any alarm he had you set, and change the order for delivery to me. I’ll take it to his workshop. Get Dum-E lined up, and let’s get our game plan in action. We need to play our cards right.”

-

An hour later, Darcy had some of the most expensive sushi that Tony’s credit card could buy, specialty ordered from Masa. Thankfully, Chef Masa Takayama was well used to Tony’s strange and often extreme short notice demands, so it hadn’t been too difficult to have it delivered same day. She didn’t even know what was in the carefully packaged boxes of food she had delivered to her just a short while ago, but she was sure it was going to be delicious.

She felt this would go a long way to buttering Tony up, instead of letting Tony resort to ordering in shawarma. Darcy still didn’t know why, when Tony felt he needed to have a serious conversation over food, that he resorted to the Middle Eastern cuisine.

Darcy entered into Tony’s workshop the way she entered any place that Tony was deeply engrossed in work - quietly and with wide, assessing eyes. Jane and Bruce’s disasters tended to be sporadic, but huge, where Tony was more of a constant low-level, walking disaster-zone. Better safe than having to chop off 6 inches of hair. She had felt bad for the intern she had sent to fetch Tony, but to be fair, Darcy did pay for a very expensive stylist to fix the disaster.

Tony was hunched over one of his tablet screens, muttering out directions to the automated note-taking program Jarvis often had running in the background during the engineer’s more creative moments. From what Darcy could tell, he was neck deep in deconstructing Erik Selvig’s work and reworking it to make it scalable for the satellite array. With the Convergence gearing up faster than they anticipated, they realized that their work was too far behind. Tony had been hacking away at the problems frantically for days.

She made a mental note to have another baking session soon. She had been scrolling through recipes lately, and she thought she finally found a cookie recipe that even Tony wouldn’t be able to fuck up.

“Jarvis, make a note, the user interface for these are a piece of shit. I see where he was going, but this was the complete opposite of intuitive. Look at my new numbers, sending them to you now. Get Darcy to try to sort out some of the native coding on the updated control panel. We need to be able to not only use these to analyze data real time, the gravimetric spikes’ influence on space-time needs to be taken into account simultaneously, otherwise we’re probably looking at calibration lags and we’ll lose accuracy. Hmmm … probably only within a 3 meter radius. But considering what happened with that terrorist cell setting up camp in Nicaragua from a few months ago, you remember how much 3 meters can matter. Hmmm … matter. Why am I suddenly hungry?”

Tony didn’t look up once as Darcy shuffled around the table set up in a corner of his workshop, clearing the worst of the debris, carefully shooing away Dum-E as he tried, and failed, to help her clean.

Tony continued to natter on without pause, his ponderings oscillating wildly between strangely personal tidbits to science jargon that still occasionally escaped her, even though she was only a month or two from a new Master’s degree. ( _ It would have happened sooner, but shit happened, okay?  _ Darcy would reassure herself).

Darcy noticed the exact moment that Tony paused, collecting and collating his thoughts into coherent streams. She knew, from experience, that this was the perfect time to get his attention.

“Yo, daddy-o, lunch time,” she loudly intoned, knowing that the recognition of their biological connection, more than anything, would bring Tony’s attention to her.

She held up the boxes of sushi, along with a large can of diet redbull (don’t even talk to Darcy about how this became a thing), and shook them in his direction as his eyes, though looking at her, were still a little hazy with science.

His stomach bit out a grumble that Darcy could hear from 10 meters away. She smiled at him condescendingly.

“Heya short stacks,” his eyebrows furrowed adorably, trying to remember if he had put lunch on their schedules for that day or another one, and drew a mental blank. “Shit, is that Masa?”

“Yes. He would also like to remind you that you are a complete ass for not coming to enjoy his hospitality but he expects you at his home in Japan in the summer when the sea bass is in season, since he knows you like it.” Darcy laughed to herself, loving every moment she got to get people irked at Tony without him knowing.

“Have you been to Japan yet, Darcy?” He flashed down quickly to his Stark pad, “Hmmm … I’m pretty sure I have a condo in Tokyo. Jarvis, make a note. If I have a condo in Tokyo, make sure it’s livable for June. If we don’t have one, buy one” He looked at Darcy with a bright smile on his face, “Make that two, put the second in Darcy’s name. We’ll get you started on Japanese.”

Darcy rolled her eyes, but decided to pick her battles. She was still trying to get him to take back a pony he had bought her on a whim. It was ridiculous. Despite Bubbles being a hella amazing horse, she didn’t have time for that.

“Come over and eat,” she said. She handed You a usb drive discreetly, as she shooed him away from the work table. He left with his usual dejected air, mechanical claw drooping sadly, but the usb safely in his grip. She knew that Jarvis would be communicating with You to coordinate uploading it into the workshop’s remote servers.

Tony looked down at himself, checking his hands briefly and evaluating whether or not he needed a full shower or just to wash his hands. He dismissed the thought suddenly, and headed towards the table. It wouldn’t be the first time he ate this way, and he was 97% sure he hadn’t been in contact with anything he needed to worry about.

“Fantastic. Has anyone remarked on your awesomeness lately?” He paused, eyes becoming wolfish, “Except for Captain Spangly-pants?”

“I’m tempted to throw something at your smug face,” she said, in lieu of a real response to that question. “Now come and sit and eat and be merry.”

The moment Tony sat down, his stomach let out another deep growl. Before he could think, he started grabbing pieces of nigiri and sushi with his bare finger tips and shoveling them into his mouth. “Ohhh … mish … ish … sooo … mgood.” Neither of them would have been surprised to know Tony hadn’t eaten anything more substantial than a meal replacement smoothie and some granola bars.

The first several minutes passed in a blur of Darcy slapping Tony’s hands away from the best rolls, and stealing back her own diet redbull ( _ Ugh … bad habits everywhere _ , she would think, but that wouldn’t prevent her from indulging the much needed caffeine boost despite the day’s already pretty high intake).

It was, perhaps, the most uncomplicated meal Darcy had had in recent memory. It was just a shame that it was originally intended as a distraction. Darcy heard the doors to the workshop discreetly lock, and wondered if Tony had heard the commotion.

If she and Jarvis were right, and as long as Tony didn’t try  _ too hard _ to get out, the little bug she had introduced to the door mechanism should buy her lunch time of uninterrupted Tony time. It was the best they could do on such short notice.

Darcy waited until Tony had finished one redbull, and was making grabby hands for another one that Darcy had been swiping away, before she moved their light exchanges to something more serious.

“Sooooo ….” She started off awkwardly. She never professed to being terribly smooth. Manipulation and lying, strangely, didn’t make Darcy feel this awkward. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

Tony’s entire easy-going demeanor, instead of falling away as one might expect, gathered around him like armor. “If Steve got you pregnant, he should make an honest woman out of you.”

She refused to blush. She refused, and shook her head. “It’s about Bruce.”

“Do you really want to get into that Darcy?” He waved his hands in a complicated motion that Darcy didn’t know how to interpret. “Because I’d be happy to tell you how much Bruce likes to have me be in the middle.”

She chucked the can she was holding at his face. “Ugh … I both don’t want to know and also good for you, you knucklehead.” It hit his forehead, but he still managed to catch it. He immediately popped it open. He had not been replacing alcohol with energy drinks, he promised.

“No. I’m here to tell you that you are being a jackass and you need to stop.” She was firm and decisive, and 100% sure she was right.

Tony blinked his eyes in confusion. “Abbbbouuutttt???” He inquired, truly perplexed.

“It’s about the Hulk countermeasures. Specifically, the Mark XLIV.”

The rage that lit in Tony’s eyes at those words, while expected, was not something she was truly prepared to see. She could see the white of his knuckles through his clenched fist. “Yeah, no. We can talk about that on the 5 th of Never.” His eyes sharpened on her. “Did he ask you to talk to me about this? He shouldn’t be dragging my  _ fucking  _ daughter into our disagreements. That is not the kind of shit Bruce or Pepper gets to pull on me.”

She knew knew that she was likely the biggest sore emotional sore spot he had, like a Rudolph’s shiny-ass nose in a blizzard of other emotional baggage.

“No, that’s not what this is about. Not really,” she reassured him. “This is not about you being right, even though I am inclined to think you are.” This seemed to startle Tony, because he swallowed whatever words he was about to say.

“If you think I’m right not to make Veronica, not make another thing that’s only purpose is to subdue an already emotionally compromised man-child,” he truly did think of Hulk in those terms, “than what is this about? I’m not going to be like those men.”

She knew exactly who in Bruce’s past she was talking about. There was almost nothing about Bruce that the pair didn’t know. Likely, nothing they could even find in Shield secret files that would truly surprise them.

“This is about putting Bruce in a position that affects  _ all of us _ , Tony. This is about what Bruce thinks he needs.”

She also knew, with the same fierce understanding of truth that mathematicians felt when they saw a proof come together, that there was little that she couldn’t get away with when it came to Tony. Darcy was troubled by this, most of the time, but not right now. Right that moment, she plowed ahead.

“He is so afraid of hurting more innocent people that he didn’t come to me  _ to talk to you _ . He came to me to ask me to go behind your back and have the suit built  _ anyway _ .” Darcy’s voice was level, deceptively so.

The words dropped between them like a bomb. Louder, despite the silence, than the bomb that had plunged shrapnel into his chest that nearly shredded Tony’s physical heart years ago.

“And the fucked up thing, Tony. I could have. I could have done it. There is little you keep from me, even your schematics. I have Stark Industries at my finger tips, and Pepper hardly questions anything I do because she trusts me to look out for you.” She let him absorb this words, as his eyes flickered between enraged, horridly blank, and crushed.

His hands didn't shake and the blood in his head did not throb the beginnings of a migraine. “I fucked up. I managed to convince him I wasn’t going to listen, didn’t weigh his opinion enough into the equation.” She could see the moment it switched to self-loathing, the kind that was so deep seated that she understood that it was only ever looking for an excuse to make something feel like it was your own fault. “Shit.”

He looked like he was ready to storm out and cause a scene, probably with something ridiculously expensive, to say he was sorry. She reached out, and grabbed his calloused fingers and kept them clenched softly in her hand.

“The thing is, Tony, I think you are 100% right about this. I think there are ways to help Bruce that don’t involve violence. I’ve been making lists. There is some promising research, particularly around severe childhood trauma, that involve relaxation exercises and trigger words that would make more sense.”

“Okay, so you get that. Now, how do I get Bruce to see that?” He whined out, but he moved his hand to be holding hers (smaller and so much finer than his own, more like an artist’s than an engineer’s), and began rubbing his thumb across her knuckles.

“None of that matters if  _ Bruce _ can’t get past his own fear unless the Mark XLIV is built,” she said, bluntly.

They sat, Tony’s hair wild and the lights dimmed and the noon-sun firmly shut out by the shuttered windows to his workshop. They looked a pair, the two of them, sitting in silence and contemplating large green men with a lot of rage fueled by even greater fear.

“Honesty is the new policy, eh?” He said, clenching his hand somewhat, like he was worried she was going to pull away from the unexpected, but much welcome, contact.

“I’m trying,” Darcy did not let the words make her voice heavy. She was terribly unsuccessful. “Too many balls in the air, they’ll all come crashing down.”

“I have no room to judge about keeping cards close to your chest.” He squeezed her hand once more, before finally letting it drop. But he still kept it on the table, just in case she needed it. “But you let me know when you’re in over your head, yeah? There is little my huge brain and bigger bank account can’t fix.”

Darcy was entirely unsurprised he managed to get this conversation back around to her. It was, to the best of her knowledge, the entire point he had tried to schedule this little lunch date. She wouldn’t be surprised if more of these were coming up in her future.

“Clint and Natasha are on board. Coulson’s staying far away, for now. I’m pretty sure I have a way to get into Fury’s office to start the data transfer, without involving anybody outside of us. Which makes the whole ‘not-telling-Steve’ moot, even though I think you’re stupid to think he’d be more loyal to Shield-merica than to us. And I’m pretty sure I’m doing something vaguely illegal, but definitely unethical, with British Parliament right now.” When she said it like that, it actually didn’t sound so bad, she would think. “If any of that tanks, which will be in the next few days if they do, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Tony’s laughed started low, a soft chuckle that was made just with the slightest intake of breath, until it gradually built from his diaphragm outward into a booming full-bodied laugh.

Darcy couldn’t help but respond in kind.

“You are a terror. A wonderful, brilliant, terror.”

**Her smile was like the edge of a repulsor blast as it melted metal. “Thanks, dad,” she said softly, smug and proud and shy in equal measure. **


	12. Grief and Scones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SOOOOOO SORRY IT TOOK ME 3 MONTHS TO UPDATE. Life has been wonky, but I'm back and committed to telling this story.
> 
> Many thanks again to [AngelicSodaCan](http://angelicsodacan.tumblr.com/), the bestest beta anyone could ask for. Seriously, everyone, the best!!!!!!!!!!! Any mistakes left in the work are all my fault.

Darcy was avoiding phone calls from London in the same way she avoided the attorneys handling her parents’ estate when she started applying to colleges. In this situation, she no longer had Annabelle. Her mothers’ mother was a sharp-eyed woman, with hair always carefully made up in a tight bun that was somehow still mostly black despite being well into her 70’s. She made sure that Darcy didn’t worry about a thing, even as old age crept up on her like a rising tide.

Darcy had only just finished a grueling two-hour long meeting with Pepper Potts, which initially was meant to only be about the end of quarter reports. Instead, it quickly devolved into reviewing the process Darcy would need to go through for for her year-end performance review that would result in her officially being named the Vice President of Special Projects. The process was frustrating to the extreme and though Darcy wasn’t an accountant by any measure, she knew damn well that Special Projects expenditures were far larger than the staff size their department warranted. Their profit projections had them outstripping other departments - Hell, other companies - by lightyears.

The brown-haired young woman did not want to be thinking about that at the moment. On a normal day, it was already a shit-show in the making just watching her attempt to keep her work life running smoothly. Add the Shield debacle and the chaos it has created in her personal life… Well, Darcy was taking shelter in her room at Clint’s place. 

Her old band posters, Spice Girls and inspirational science posters and girl power politicians, hanging up around her bed. Five quilts of different shades she made for herself, one tucked carefully into her trunk that Annabelle had made. Her most comfortable clothing, all carefully packed away. It was her hidden nook of comfortable stuff.

The not-comfortable stuff, her expensive suits and heels worth some people’s monthly salaries, were carefully put away on the floor that Tony had carved out for her below his suite (Darcy didn’t know what he had been using that floor for before, and she was a little afraid to ask). 

Tony’s wild-eyed insistence that she take a room in his penthouse led her to this compromise, allowing her to still live primarily with Clint but still be closer to Tony. In retrospect, she now thought it was a ploy to force her to make this compromise. Darcy wouldn’t put it past that crafty bastard.

Plus, Darcy was trying to do her best to assuage the still - mostly - unresolved jealousy on Tony’s part. She was almost 100% sure it was directed at Clint, considering their epic broship, but she thought it might actually be Coulson, with their complicated father-figure type thing they had going on. In the end, it didn’t take rocket science to figure out that there were too many variables in Tony Stark’s fucked-up psychology to accurately predict what his exact neurosis was in any moment with any reasonable success.

Darcy had been sitting on her bed trying to warm up her toes for long moments, before she realized  that she had completely wandered off in her own head.  Her thoughts kept scattering about like butterflies in a sun-lit field.

Darcy could feel the slight itch in her fingertips. The one that said that, more than anything, what she needed was a moment to breathe. A moment to walk through the familiar steps of turning sugar, flour and eggs into the sweet softness of dough. She could practically taste her craving for something sweet and spicy. 

She was fighting against her better self- and common-sense. It would, almost assuredly, completely compromise her diet plan for the week. A diet plan that mostly consisted of letting Steve - in his attempt to stay connected to the team despite the distance - take over the nutritional planning of all of the Avengers. In other words, she ate whatever the kitchens sent her under Steve’s orders. 

The exercise regime and diet plan  **_were_ ** demonstrating positive results. She was toning in a way she had never experienced before. The Star-Spangled Man With A Plan could sideline as a personal trainer and nutritionist. His menus were surprisingly satisfying, but it was unfortunate that he was so busy looking fine in a skin tight suit while saving the world. 

_ It isn’t my cheat day. But sometimes you have to cheat on cheating,  _ she finally managed to convince herself.  _ But I’m supposed to stay and help Clint make dinner. _ She had almost forgotten that in the scramble to throw herself into her bed, business suit be damned to Wrinkly Hell until the next dry-cleaning day.

_ Hmmm … but he wouldn’t say no to baked goods with dinner, _ she finally managed to convince herself. Before the thought even finalized, her feet had already begun carrying her to her closet and away from the warmth of her bed. She quickly changed into a set of jean-shorts and a Culver hoodie, her favorite one that was missing almost all of the lettering. 

She quickly headed to the exit of Clint’s apartments. Passing by the fridge, she grabbed the pack of sticky notes Coulson kept nearby to leave notes for Clint. If there was one thing you could rely on more than anything, it was that the first place Clint would go to when he woke up or entered his apartment was the refrigerator.

She wrote out in her pretty, loopy scrawl.  _ Baking in Tony’s place. Be back with treats before dinner starts. THX! ~Darce _

She fled Clint’s apartment to head to Tony’s place. The brunette  _ could  _ have gone to any apartment or kitchen in the Avengers section of the tower. She had baking supplies stocked in every one of them (even Natasha’s, despite the fact that Natasha often took great joy in describing, in great detail, how she had used them to kill people in creative ways).

There was only one problem with this set up. Tony deliberately hoarded all of the rarer baking supplies. It forced her to come to his place when she wanted to bake the more unique dishes or when she wanted to experiment, like her chocolate-walnut hibiscus pudding. Which was a disaster.  

At the moment, she really wanted cardamom ginger scones. The same ones that her grandmother taught her on her first birthday as an official orphan. She knew that she had cardamom in most of the kitchens, but she wasn’t sure about the candied ginger. Almost by default, that meant Tony’s place. 

She figured, knowing she would be dozens of scones deep before the itching in her fingers finally abated, that whatever the Science Bros didn’t eat could still go to the lab minions as a peace offering. Plus, she owed Harold in Finance. He was an AVP, a no-nonsense older white gentleman that looked like he belonged on the cast of “Grumpy Old Men” and had once been high up in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organizing the major funding streams that went to making the Freedom Summer happen in Mississippi. 

Suffice it to say, there was a reason Darcy’s Cash Flow statements were always immaculate - her bribery scones being the top amongst them. Plus, she knew she was super adorable and a little bit scary. Throw in scones, and it was a combination that not many men could resist.

She found herself standing in Tony’s kitchen not long after exiting the comfy interior of Clint’s apartment. 

She made her way through the open floor-plan penthouse and started shuffling towards the kitchen. Without conscious effort, she started ruffling through the baking supplies stashed in the cabinets above the granite counter tops. The cabinets happened to be conveniently placed above three stand mixers that, no matter how much she convinced herself she should limit Tony’s impulse to buy her things, she didn’t have the heart to get rid of.

Thankfully, Darcy had a stash of candied ginger from her desire for it a few weeks back. She pulled it down from behind her wall of her self-professed weirder baking supplies. It was hidden carefully behind the pickled mango and taro roots, where the others tended to overlook in their quest to steal her bags of gourmet chocolate chips.

“Let's get this pre-heat going, Mr. Jarvis. 350 degrees fahrenheit, please and thank you.” She called out to the room around her.

Without even needing to check in, Jarvis started her baking playlist, starting off with the upbeat melody of Zoë Keating’s amazing cello concerts.

Extrapolating on the ingredients he saw Darcy pulling from the fridge and cabinets, carefully organized data on recipes Darcy frequently used, and predictive models of factors impacting Darcy’s baking outcomes, he figured she would be ready to put her scones in the oven in approximately two minutes. Plus or minus three minutes if Clint showed up before their scheduled dinner time that evening.

“The oven will be ready when you are, Ms. Lewis,” he said simply. She nodded her thanks.

She grabbed the baking pans hidden under the island counter, which she had finally trained Dum-E and You not to put random supplies, like lugnuts and bags of chia seeds, inside. She lined the series of pans with parchment paper pulled from a Costco-sized tube.

She got out the mortar and pestle to start grinding the fresh cardamom seeds herself. She placed a hand full of seeds in the bowl, carefully picking out the ones that weren’t perfect. She grabbed the heavy wood implement in her hand, placing it into the bowl, and pushed down sharply. The first crunch of the seeds released their sharp smell, hitting her nostrils with force.

She thought about her grandmother’s soft hands and nasally voice. She could practically hear her grandmother’s voice singing Billie Holiday’s “Blue Moon” over the soft click of a metal whisk against a glass mixing bowl.

When Darcy had about a teaspoon of cardamom ground into fine powder, she stirred it gently into the mixture, adding in slices of a stick of butter while she was at it. The young woman turned on the stand mixture with a flourish. The machine started smoothly, with hardly a whisper except for the sound of turning blades. She stared at it with faraway eyes. Her crystalline blue eyes only lost their spaciness when the mixture finally turned coarse and crumbly. She carefully carefully portioned out the sugar, sour cream, and egg into the mixture.

She reached for the bag of candied ginger, grabbing it firmly between her two hands. She tore off the top, and reached into the bag for a large chunk of the sweetly-sharp root. She still needed to chop it into smaller pieces, but before she did that, she bit into the large, almost orange slice-like, large piece of ginger.

The flavor rolled out from tip to root of her tongue, a rolling wave of sweet sharpness. She stood, completely still in the silence of the kitchen, for long enough that Jarvis started to get worried. Jarvis had to turn up the sensors in Tony’s kitchen, almost beyond the acceptable privacy parameters that he had programmed for himself, to hear that she was still breathing.

A breath shuddered out of her mouth, like a cork from a champagne bottle, before she shook herself out of the slight stupor. She started dicing the pieces of ginger into smaller pieces, before rushing to put them back into the mixture. She carefully pushed the pulse blend option on the mixer, leaving it on only a few seconds at a time so that should would not overmix the batter. When it was finally the consistency she approved of, she took the bowl out off the mixer stand, and carefully started forming rolled balls of dough between her palms.

She placed them deftly on the pan before cracking an egg into the now-empty bowl and whisking it quickly with water. Brushing the small balls with the mixture quickly, she moved to grab the brown sugar. She took fistfulls of the brown sugar in her hand, using a careful shake of her fist to evenly powder all of the little balls.

She slid them into the large chrome oven and started quickly on the next batch, without thought.

“Will you do me a favor, Jay?” She asked, her voice sounding almost hoarse. A prisoner of war speaking after a long silence.

“Anything at all, Ms. Lewis,” he said with a certain tinge of honesty that Darcy was not sure she wanted to be on the receiving side of. 

“Set a timer for thirty minutes.” She paused, staring at the bag of candied ginger on the counter, before grabbing another large chunk. 

“Is there anything else you would like, Ms. Lewis?” Jarvis prodded, politely but firmly not relenting on expressing the worry that he felt was deserved.

She bit into it the chunk in her hand, savoring it slowly, and continued on chewing slowly until she gathered her thoughts.

“Call Steve for me? Would you?” She asked around the sticky sweetness on her teeth.

“Of course, Ms. Lewis.” He responded simply. When his first attempt at calling Steve was met with no answer, he had absolutely no qualms in applying a technological equivalent of a boot to a door to get an answer.

Somewhere along the boards of Azerbaijan, Steve’s phone vibrated. He was sure that he had turned it off completely, but he could already guess that it could only be one of three people on the other side of the line. He stilled his breath, and sharpened his ears. He could hear 8 people breathing in their sleep, leaving just Natasha (who breathed too quietly to be heard even by him). 

He touched his headpiece quietly, synching it to his phone.

“What is it, Stark?” He asked, voice gentle and hushed. If it was Tony, he would follow up with a much harsher reply, but he was prepared for Darcy or Jarvis.

“Hey Stevie,” Darcy’s voice, almost as muted as his own, came through clearly on the line. “What’s shakin’?” 

Even though the super-soldier could tell that it was a forced cheerfulness, it didn’t stop the smile from overcoming his face like a tidal wave.

“Oh, you know. Stuff. And Things,” he said. It was a reference to his current favorite pop culture phenomenon, The Walking Dead. He was currently in love with The Walking Dead memes, taking up Darcy’s frequent pop culture reference and making them his own. It was his way of communicating to Darcy that it was not safe to talk on his end.

Steve sat in the silence of the near late evening twilight, and listened to Darcy’s breathing. He could hear her shuffling about, the slight hum of turning stand mixers and the rasp of bags being opened and closed.

It must have been twenty five minutes or more that he sat there without a word exchanged between the pair. A piece of his attention was always involuntarily attuned to his environment, assessing for threats, but what remained after that was focused laser-like on the the careful inhale and exhale of Darcy in his ear.

“What is it, doll?” Steve finally managed to get himself to say, when he heard the faint titter tatter of beeps that he knew was the Avengers kitchen.

“Just give me one moment, okay?” She said softly, loading in several more trays of scones into the additional ovens in the kitchen, before carefully unloading the first tray of scones, freshly completed. The smell of baked bread and sweet spiciness that filled the air unclenched something deep in Darcy’s shoulders. A pressure she didn’t quite know she was holding in her forehead finally smoothed out and her eyebrows unfurrowed into a more natural alignment.

Jarvis, still carefully observing but having tasked himself from commenting, finally let his attention drift away. He figured he could check the boundaries of his firewalls once more, to give Darcy her privacy even if she didn't know he was doing so.

Darcy had laid out the scones on a tray, placing them gently in the middle of Tony’s massive kitchen island. Grabbing a scone with a paper towel in hand to prevent burning herself, and quickly set the appropriate alarms on her watch, she ducked out and took to the landing pad just outside of the kitchen’s view.

“You know what the stupidest thing about grief is, Steve?” She said, standing with the cool evening air against her face and a sun already past the horizon. Darcy didn’t wait for a response before she ducked down her head and plowed forward. “That it isn’t predictable. It doesn’t make sense. Anniversaries, birthdays, a woman on the street with the same hair cut as my mom, a man on the train with my dad’s cologne. I was prepared for those. Ten years next month, and I’ve been so sure that I got a handle on it. That I’ve conquered it and moved on”

She bit harshly into the scone, and tasted salt water and grief that had nothing to do with the baked good in her hand. Steve breathed steadily and deeply, just deep enough for her to hear, and she was grateful.

“Instead, I woke up this morning and I remembered being 11 and feeling smug when my mom decided to extend our Spring Break trip and I got one extra day before going back to school. And all I wanted was my grandmother to tell me it's alright, but she’s been gone for a long time too.” Her heart thumped a dull rhythm against her spine, like it wanted to sneak out the back rather than burst from her chest.

“Hey, doll,” Steve sighed out carefully. “I’m here.” He scratched along the side of his neck, his throat feeling too large for his tactical suit. He didn’t bother with empty platitudes like “it's going to be okay” or “it's alright.” He knew how hollow those words always sounded to him.

“Did you ever read my file?” The brunette asked suddenly, shifting topics whiplash-quick.

“No, no I didn’t, Darcy,” he said. “Not for lack of curiosity, though,” he said, reassuringly and a touch fond. “Personal policy. Don’t read personnel files for non-enemies. Shit,” he let out a rare curse, “It's all I can do to avoid any of that stuff, with Tony’s life story strewn across the internet like an oil slick.”

He knew that Darcy had read multiple biographies on Steve Rogers in the course of her undergraduate degree. It was almost impossible to avoid talking about American Imperialism without at least noting the various ways Steve’s image had been used for political/propaganda purposes, from McCarthy to Nixon’s War on Drugs to Clinton’s welfare regime. The only things she didn’t know about him were in files so redacted that there weren’t digital copies available anywhere where Darcy could get her hands on them. (Hell, the girl introduced herself to him by asking, “Settle one thing for me, Mr. Spangly Pants. You and Bucky Barnes, did you really  _ double team _ a Latverian spy to get their intel on Hydra?”)

She didn’t wait along time before responding, but it felt longer, the moment stretching like taffy. “It was stupid,” there was anger enough to melt steel. “That’s the thing. It was dumb. No Hollywood tragic death by cancer. No saving orphans from a fiery bus or a mugging gone wrong. They were cleaning the gutters. She was on the ladder, because she never trusted him to be thorough. She lost her balance, fell from 10 feet, landed on her head. Just a stupid accident.”

Darcy wasn’t even home, thankfully, when it happened. She was at a friend’s house, blocks away, when the police arrived at her door with somber expressions on their faces.

“The police told me that my dad immediately called 911. She was conscious but responding funny. They thought it was just a concussion. My dad took the car so he could pick me up after she got checked out.”

Her hands shook around the crumbs of the half-eaten scone squashed in her fist, like she had forgotten that it was there.

“By the time my dad arrived at the hospital ER, she had already died of an aneurysm.” Steve made soft, almost wounded, reassuring noises at her. The kinds of reassuring nonsense everyone made but no one could consciously create.

“ _ He should have waited _ ,” the words felt like firecrackers in a bottle. Burning and contained and destructive. “He didn’t wait for the grief counselor or the social worker or police at the hospital. He just rushed out, not telling anyone where he was going. But I know,” she paused. “He was coming for me.”

At that moment, Steve absolutely hated SHIELD. Hated his job, and the future, and the world. Hated that this particular confluence of circumstances and choices meant that he couldn’t be next to Darcy ( _ His best girl _ , he thought), when she probably needed him most. Knowing her, a small part of him knew that this was the only way she would have told him anything.

Distance made Darcy’s guard drop. _ Too close, and she spooks, _ he thought.

“God, almost 10 years Steve, and I’m still so fucking angry at him. I imagine it, you know. Him starting to cry, vision going blurry, didn’t notice the red light. That he just wanted to get me, to make sure I was alright,” her words trailed off softer and softer. 

“If he had just waited, if he had let himself forget about me for a little longer, processed the grief, let someone else take care of collecting me … Maybe I wouldn’t have lost both my parents that day.” She said the words the same way Steve said his confessions, like they were waiting for judgement and absolution. “That my 70 year old grandmother wouldn’t have to take me in, only to die of old age 5 years later the summer before college.”

“Not everyone is going to leave you, Darcy,” Steve tried to convince her. He said, knowing that whatever shards of his twice-broken heart were still left, they would come alive for Darcy.

“Ha!” she bursts out sarcastically, choking on the bitterness and not letting a sneer form on her face, trying to let herself remember the fondness. “You sound like Annabelle.”

“Well, it must be cause we’re from the same generation,” he tentatively offered her. Her laugh made the tight coil of tension in his chest unspool.

“‘I might not make it to your second graduation, Darcy Mae,’” she imitated a high, nasally voice. “Don’t ask me why she called me that, I don’t have a middle name.”

She paused to collect her breath before continuing, “‘But goddammit you are gonna promise me that won’t stop you, or I swear to Christ I’ll haunt you, sweet thing.’”

For the first time, Darcy let him hear her sobbing.

“I’m here, doll,” he said, nodding only once in acceptance when the flash of red hair at the corner of his eyes signaled to him that the rest of his team were waking up soon to move out for their mission. “I’m here.”

He saw the way she acted with Clint and Thor, all bright sibling affection and diehard loyalty. He saw the way she was with Natasha and Jane, quiet and sneaky and big-sisterly. He even saw the oh-so-careful parental relationships she had with Tony and Pepper -  even Coulson and Bruce to smaller extents.

Steve desperately hoped he would never lose the privilege of access to this vulnerable intimacy. This intimacy, not one that just promised sweet-words and candlelight and warm bodies, but the quiet bearing of duct-taped hearts and nightmares. He wanted to gather her into his hands - hands that still surprised him with how big and uncalloused they were - hold her close and claim this piece for himself. 

If she let him.

Her tears fell like promises and Hail Mary’s, and Steve had never felt more prepared to take on the world than when she whispered  _ thank you, Stevie _ to him at the end of the call.


	13. Command and Consequence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks again to [AngelicSodaCan](http://angelicsodacan.tumblr.com/), the bestest beta anyone could ask for. Seriously, everyone, the best!!!!!!!!!!! Any mistakes left in the work are all my fault.

She stared at the archer’s dower face, eyebrows pinched and the slight down-turn to his lips that meant he was prepared to try to convince her out of her current course of action. There were only a handful of faces that would have been more frightening, and Darcy was glad to be presented with this one. At his worst, he would pleasantly pretend he agreed with her in a very believable way, and then somehow her Metro card would disappear, or her Culver bike magically would gain two tire punctures, or one of her dates would get canceled that “had nothing to do with death threats” at all.

Darcy had cleared her plate of the lasagna that Clint had made, using the fresh italian bread that Jarvis had delivered to sop up the last of the Chianti-based homemade marinara sauce. The marinara was chunky without being too chunky, the pasta baked to perfection, and the cheese filling was as fluffy as a dream. While Clint was a deft hand with a knife and anything rice based, when it came to pasta dishes the lasagna was the only thing he could do well. And by well, she meant, it was the best freaking thing she had put in her mouth in days. By mutual pact, any non-lasagna incidents were to be repressed and never spoken of again (especially the Linguini Incident of last September).

They also did not speak about the slight red puffiness to Darcy’s eyes that gave evidence to the fact that she had been crying recently.

“How long do you need?” He said, curtly, jaw clenched. Only his absolute physical self-control prevented him from ruining the fork in his hand. It was a part of his favorite cutlery set, one that was perfectly weighted for use as a throwing weapons.

“Four hours,” she said, trying to sound like she believed what she was saying and not highballing to try to end up at an acceptable compromise. She broke the staring contest going on between them suddenly, eyes shifting downwards involuntarily.

The only verbal response she got from the archer was a rather unattractive snort. When she looked back up again, his right eyebrow shot up high enough to crinkle his entire forehead, an  _ Are you fucking stupid?  _ so clear in it that Darcy almost flinched. 

“Three?” She offered tentatively but got absolutely no reaction in response. She was gripping her wrist gently beneath the table, and the staccato rhythm of her heartbeat against her finger-tips measured the 10 long seconds that stretched between them until she got a response.

“Sixty minutes, and not a single second longer,” Clint finally said, voice gruff and loaded down with displeasure. His eyes narrowed fiercely, “And arms training with me for a month. And you either let Bruce or Tony give you their crash course on making explosives.” The young woman held her face steady as Clint calmly listed off his set of conditions, “And homemade doughnuts.”

He felt his affection swell up, fierce and protective, as he stared at the young woman before him and waited for a sign of acceptance or capitulation on the brunette’s face. “You got it, bud,” she said definitively, absolutely no signs of hesitation on her face in agreeing to the archer’s terms.

He almost regretted where the conversation was about to go next, but Clint had spent almost every spare moment of the last year of his life with this young woman. He knew exactly how many lives he had taken to protect her. How many threats he had failed to take out before they reached her. How many that she had to eliminate herself before her own hands were stained red (it still confused him sometimes, when he held her hand through a nightmare, that they were still soft, that there were no calluses or scars on them).

As much as she had gone through, he knew from personal experience that things could always,  _ always _ get worse. 

He took a quick, calculated breath, before moving on. “You want to get out of the Tower, arrive at an unspecified location, and return to the Tower with no one the wiser. Just getting you  _ out  _ of the Tower given a day of planning with those conditions would be nearly impossible for most trained agents.”

Darcy's face went soft, she shuffled in the loose, off the shoulder black sabbath t-shirt she had started using as pajamas. “Are you saying you can't do it? Because I think your previous statement just meant that you would.”

He shook his head slightly, his hair was longer than the normal buzzcut, slight blond bangs falling just above his eyebrows. “No, I can do it. That's the problem Darcy. What you're asking of me … there is something you need to understand. Are you ready to hear it?” 

Darcy couldn’t explain why, exactly, her heart stuttered in her chest the way it did. She swallowed her instinctive reaction to do anything to wipe that look off of the bleak look on Clint’s face, and simply nodded.

“There are so many eyes on you, both friend and foe, that to give you what you ask for would require some very morally gray actions on my part,” he said, succinctly. Just thinking of what it would take to make sure no one could see or understand what she was doing - including Shield, the Avengers and any other agency in the world that might just happen to looking in her direction, well … it gave her a headache. She knew she couldn’t guarantee  _ complete  _ anonymity without help.

She could almost see the various plans, backup plans, and back-up to the back-up plans flash in his eyes. The last time she saw him look like that, a small village in Colombia vanished without a trace. “I will do it, because it's for you, and I trust that you wouldn’t ask this of me unless it was important. But whatever the consequences are, they are not mine alone. Whatever damage is done, is damage that you have to accept responsibility for.”

He stared at her with eyes that burned, and burned, and burned. “You cannot command without consequence. Are you prepared to accept that?”

Darcy closed her eyes, and felt the pull of tight skin across her thighs. The scars there, incurred from being electrocuted repeatedly by a cattle prod, were almost completely gone. But sometimes she still felt it, the twitch of muscle and burning of skin. She thought of the look in Coulson’s eye when she made her ultimatum in the twilight in front of the Potomac, and the sound that punched out of Tony’s throat when he saw what Shield had on him.

“No one innocent will be hurt?” she asked, swallowing.

“I can’t guarantee that Darcy. If anyone ever tells you that they can, they’re lying,” he said with a sad smile. While a part of him thought that she was incredibly naive to ask that question, the greater part of him was glad that she did. It was part of what made her worth protecting.

She closed her eyes again, clenched her fists together, still under the table. A brief moment later, she nodded softly.

“Give me the timeframe and the address, and I will make it happen,” he said simply, standing up quickly from his side of the table. He circled the dining table, approached her from her non-dominant side (some habits are impossible to break for spies), and pulled her into his arms. 

“Come on, Darce,” he said, soothingly. He easily pulled her up and took her to his couch, where they cuddled under the purple afghan she had made him.

“Fuck, Clint,” she said, “Just … fuck.”

“I’m sorry, Darcy.” He murmured into the air, as she smooshed her face into his shoulder blade. He didn’t even flinch as she pressed into a bone-bruise hidden under the dark black of his shirt sleeve.

“No, no. It's fine. You’re right. I get why you’re right, I really do. I just … “ she paused and exhaled laboriously. “How do I know if it is the right thing?” 

She hesitated, “How can anything be worth that uncertainty?”

“You can’t know, Darce” he said, he grabbed the remote, squished somewhere underneath his right thigh, and turned on the TV to the Xena marathon that had been meaning to watch together, to break down if they could recreate the battle scenes or the science. “You lean on me, on us, and we deal with it together. That’s the only thing that matters. We do it  _ together _ , okay?”

“Is it too late to go back to get a Ph.D and call it quits on this Dan Brown espionage bullshit?” She asked, voice full of mockery, desperately hoping to break the tension of the moment.

Clint laughed, allowing her paltry efforts to succeed. “I thought you didn’t want to be, and I quote, ‘an overworked, underpaid zombie in legal indentured servitude to shitty professors who barely qualify as sentient let alone intelligent.’” Clint even added in her regal, haughty sniff to the end of the statement.

Darcy wiggled a little on the couch, ungraciously propping her feet up onto the armrest of the couch to settle in to watch some Xena before bed. Darcy fell asleep on his shoulder well before the first fight scene and unique, whistley screech of Xena’s battle cry.

\--

The next morning, Darcy was on the phone with an apparently-calm-but-secretly-frazzled VP of Stark Europe, on the update of their dubious underground dealings with British Parliament.  Darcy had only barely managed to get back from one of her, now almost daily, Starbucks drink runs (Grande Chai made with apple juice and a swirl of caramel).

She was sipping on the grossly sweet concoction, while listening to the middle-aged British gentleman wait patiently in the midst of her furious silence. 

She continued on, after a particularly loud sip and smack of her lips, “What do you mean you’ve been keeping an eye on Jane?” Darcy inquired, voice buttery smooth. She had already been up since 5am that morning, her tone was clearly not a  _ please answer the question _ so much as it was a  _ what the fuck were you thinking? _ .

Rufus Williams sighed quietly into the phone, scrounging up the backbone of steel that let him shake off his first fractured jaw to keep playing in his university cup game. “Ms. Lewis,” he said with that polite British tone that spoke of Oxford-learning but hid the rough-drawl of a born and bred Londoner. “The number of inquiries I have received from the British government in the last 24 hours has increased by 25%. Most of them asking if Stark Industries is responsible for ‘whatever is making things disappear’ and ‘space-time being wonky.’” 

Darcy held in her snort; she did like the man. He continued on when she didn’t immediately respond, “It was clear to me that Dr. Foster’s unscheduled arrival to the UK was connected to this event, and I merely placed discreet security and dispatched personal assistants to ensure that her every need was accommodated during her stay.”

If Darcy hadn’t recently strong-armed the man (in her defense, it wasn’t that much strong arming, the man  _ enjoyed _ his job) into bribing and potentially blackmailing elected officials to get some legislation passed, she would have thought that he was completely sincere. Instead, reading between the lines, she was guessing that he was finalizing their agreed upon objectives, and trying to ensure that no one, particularly Jane, had the opportunity to muck it up.

Darcy was very glad that Pepper had decided to keep this guy after the most recent fiasco with the South Asian branch. 

She closed her eyes and tried to think of the best course of action to take with this development. She picked at the blue-collared white blouse that she was wearing, and wondered how closely SHIELD was watching Stark Industries at that moment. They would notice the London office’s increased interest in Jane and attribute that to the space-time distortions, at the very least. Which might not be a bad thing, if Darcy could somehow make them look more closely at Jane’s activities, it might perhaps divert their attention from her and Rufus and increase the likelihood of her objectives becoming reality.

She ignored the sour taste she knew this would leave in her mouth and continued on, a little bit angry at herself because she knew this would bring Janie a lot of unnecessary, and potentially dangerous, attention. 

“Damn, I was hoping we handle this situation without too much governmental attention,” she continued on, successfully infusing just the right amount of petulance into her voice. “The disturbances should wrap up with in the next few days, and Foster and Selvig have already begun triangulating how to mitigate the worst of the damage. So, here are your marching orders. Secondary Priority: The tech they are working on right now is worth more than your life, keep it safe or I take it out of your hide. Priority One: Protect the brains that made the tech. From this moment forward until the end of the disturbances, Dr. Foster and Dr. Selvig get double security.”

“Might I inquire on the nature of the disturbances and technology at stake, Ms. Lewis?” He used that cool-drawl that the well-educated were so adept at, that said they were asking a polite question but in their head they were secretly thinking  _ fuck you _ . 

“No, you may not.” Darcy smiled at the man’s ability to play his part. She promised in her head that the man was getting a very very big present from Special Project this year.

She waved a hand in the air in the general direction of Jarvis, pointing two fingers to her eyes before redirecting them to the picture of Jane and Darcy on her office wall. She knew the AI would understand that she wanted every available eye on Jane from that moment forward, and that the artificial intelligence would find a way to discreetly signal to Jane and Eric to proceed with caution for the next few days.

“Very well Ms. Lewis, you will have the expense reports for these assignments sent to you at the end of each business day,” he cracked his knuckles, a clear sign of nervousness that he hadn’t trained out of himself.

He had a lot of work to do, and realized that time was slipping between his fingers faster than he had anticipated. He was not surprised at all that Darcy had simply hung up to move on to the next important thing.

There was a tickle at the back of his head, that made him think of how the young girl somehow had the same rough-charm that Tony Stark had, but the cool sharp-toothed polish of Pepper Potts. He had become pretty adept at publically acting towards Darcy the same way all the other executive leadership took, while privately trying to build a rapport. It was no skin off his back that they couldn’t see the way the winds were blowing in this company, and he wasn’t stupid enough to ignore an emerging power when he saw one - or the way that Potts and Stark took the young brunette under their respective wings.

-

Moments after the phone hung up, Darcy’s phone vibrated, but there were none of her specialty ring tones that let her know what kind of text it was (a bird like trill for Avengers, a sharp whistle that meant Shield, a bell for Stark Industries). When she tapped at the screen, the soft glowing gold and red background lit up.

Sitting on the middle of her screen there was a blank text from an unlisted number with what looked like a Kansas City area code. With a quick swipe from the left of the screen, pulling up the app bench, and she hit a little icon stylized like a mouse. Her tracking algorithms were all coded into the application.

The screen pulled up her range of customized trackers. She launched the first, and it came up blank. She went through the list, watching as her more sophisticated trackers pinged through satellites and rerouted and dummy identities, showing strings of latitude and longitude coordinates but never coming up with identities or even shell companies they were associated with.

Some even came back completely blank. Darcy was equal parts nervous and furious.

It was only as she launched her most sophisticated algorithm that she noticed, unconsciously, the pattern that emerged before her eyes. The strings of numbers corresponding to latitude and longitude, seemingly random, were anything but.

If she was right, the series of coordinates generated by her tracking algorithms were each different products of her earliest attempt at a random prime number generator made at age 15. It produced two primes, sufficiently different, for the base of an asymmetric 4096-bit encryption that she had been working on at the time (she didn't have nearly enough processing power then to encrypt her files, let alone use some of her more interesting cracking algorithms that could hack such encryptions).

Only the Avengers had her proprietary tracking apps. Of those, only Clint had been on the end of her drunken rambles that had anything to do with the way she coded at 15. When she mentally reversed the numbers and ran them through the number to text code used by the Avengers, it read:

60 MIN ON SIGNAL. EXIT VIA 65TH FL CONF RM.

_ Fuck,  _ Darcy thought,  _ that's not enough time.  _ While quickly gathering the cascade of hair around her face in a practiced motion to place it in a secure bun. She discreetly started tapping at her left handed bracelet, a nearly indestructible gold-titanium alloy that was unremovable by anyone but Darcy and Tony, that Tony had designed and insisted she wear for tracking and security. She spoke her legal name out loud, the bracelet deactivated with a soft click, and immediately launched the worm she snuck into Tony’s tracking software so it wouldn't register the disappearance of the bracelet's signal.

She was very glad that she had taken to wearing tactically appropriate clothing under her business clothes. In fact, it was such a part of her normal wardrobe, that she hadn't even noticed the moment that almost all of her bras were entirely new and yet extremely comfortable sports bras. She never bought them, and didn't have the nerve to ask if Tony or someone else had designed them.

Either way, she moved quickly to pull out the small backpack from her office drawer that she had taken to keeping and updating for emergencies. It had energy bars, weapons, tech, and simple disguise tools. The only addition she made was adding in a micro-sd chip that she popped out of her StarkTab.

She had barely had a chance to get ready to stand, discarding items of clothing and jewelery she knew to be bugged, when the lights flickered in the building and the swoosh of locking down doors could be heard.

Jarvis’ voice blared, echoing throughout every office but her own.

_ “Ingress attempt, code blue. Please proceed to your designated safety point.”  _

She barely waited for the code to be repeated before she was out her office door, heading to the secure stair shaft that would get her to the 65th floor.


	14. Seeing a Man About a Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey folks, 
> 
> Here is the next chapter. I promise, I am about two/thirds of the way done with this work. A lot of loose ends will be wrapped up.
> 
> That being said, chapter 15 might take some time coming. I have a prompt-fill from my wonderful Beta, [AngelicSodaCan](http://angelicsodacan.tumblr.com/), the bestest beta anyone could ask for. I will be working on that for a bit. Alas, never fear, I love writing this story and look forward to the many surprises still to come.
> 
> And hey ... thanks for reading. You're the best.

Stark Tower was originally designed as five sub-sections of floors stacked one on top of the other, each capable of existing almost completely independently of each other. The 10 top-most floors were originally intended to be Tony’s Science Wonderland of labs, but after The Battle of New York, they were reorganized to function as the base of operations for the Avengers - which included their training rooms, the private labs/offices, armory, holding cells and helipad. The 10 floors below that, originally earmarked as Stark Industries office space, were restructured for the Avengers living quarters, guest rooms, and other miscellany.

None of those mattered to Darcy at the moment, because it was the rest of the building that was going to get her into trouble. Her office - which she exploded out of fast enough to cause the door to hit the wall in a harsh boom - was located at the very top of the 12 floors of Special Projects, just below the first floor of the Avengers area (which was actually a decoy, mostly filled with fake rooms and traps).

She reviewed her mental map of the Avengers Tower (the schematics that only she and a few others were privy to), and remembered that the 65th floor was in the middle of the Stark Industries Section below Special Projects. The only problem with that, she grimaced bitterly to herself as she quietly but quickly ran through the twisting halls ways, (specially laid out to mitigate blast zones and confuse enemies), was that there was no clean cut way to get to it.

The only way to get from the top to the bottom of Special Projects was the central stairwell, which still only went down to the fifth floor; or the elevators, which would be completely nonfunctional and no way for her to override them without leaving a trail. Once she hit the bottom of Special Projects, she would have to take another stairwell to get into the Stark Industries office area just below there, and figure out how to get past dozens - if not hundreds - of people without being seen.

Not including the fact that the Tower’s five subsections were programmed to respond to different threats and react appropriately.

In case of a serious incident in the Avengers labs (far more likely to make things explode than the Special Project’s Labs), those labs came with state of the art containment safety protocols, up to and including imploding as a last resort in order to prevent even greater catastrophes from being unleashed. All of the sections contained self-contained air, water and waste filtration systems, to avoid the spread of contaminants, and she wouldn’t be able to use those during an Ingress Code Blue.

She forced herself to stop thinking of the bypasses and blunt force she would have to use to get to her destination, and not to sweat the minor explosives concealed safely in her dark blue backpack. Instead, she pulled the straps tighter as she ran, so as not to let her momentum to cause the backpack to jingle.

All of these thoughts flashed through her head over what felt like an eternity, even though she recognized that it only took her 18.7 seconds to traverse the floor (she didn’t know when she had started doing it, but she had started counting out the seconds, unconsciously synching her internal count to an almost perfect match of the actual time). The young woman hit the central staircase at a dead run, only briefly noting the violent shade of blue of the sign on the door that read “SP-12-A.”

The stairwell was dead silent, only the slight scuffle of her New Balance sneakers (dark black, looking vaguely businessy but perfect for the days she could be a little more casual). Last night, she had scheduled an order for a huge continental breakfast for the Special Projects staff. They were as used to her benevolent gift of food and baked goods as they were to her more mischievous gifts of life-size cutouts of her interpretations of their worst nightmares. As she anticipated, almost all of the minions would be concentrated in their sections on the 6th, 8th and 10th floors (biology, physics, and engineering respectively).

 _20 seconds to the stairwell, 95 seconds down, 120 seconds to bypass security, 90 seconds to get to the 65th floor_. She let the seconds tick in her head, repeating her goal, sharpening her ears and eyes to detect potential threats. She had a night-night gun that she’d stolen from Coulson’s team strapped to her left thigh.

She flew down the stairs at a breakneck pace, not worrying about the fact every camera’s light was out, and Jarvis’ voice never lost that tinny quality to it. Her skin along her thighs pulled tight on the faint scar tissue still there. She steeled herself, and flew. She was down to the fifth floor in 45.2 seconds.

 _Fuck_ , she thought in the privacy of her head, ignoring the growing harshness of her breath, _too slow._

Jarvis’ voice was only that way when his automated functions were deployed, when he was not consciously present in an announcement. _Don’t think, Darcy_ , she thought, _keep moving._

Darcy exploded into the hallway, racing down the relatively short corridor until she veered right sharply in order to avoid the elevator and more frequently used labs in that direction. Instead, she swerved and hit an emergency exit point into a separate stairwell that would take her to the first floor.

The stairwell was completely empty as she entered it at a half run (she had tried practicing those movie-star door entries, but real doors didn’t open that easily and left bruises that _hurt)_. Jarvis’ voice still echoed around her, “ _Ingress attempt, code blue. Ingress attempt, code blue_ ”, on a hollow repeat. The voice was so dull that a shiver made its way down her spine.

Almost no one frequented floors 1 through 4 of Special Projects, mostly due to the fact that it essentially operated as the basement of the area, full of supplies storage and containment units for the more interesting experiments. The lobby elevator designated for Stark Industries didn’t even open on these floors. Normally, this would be a good thing, but with the alarm ringing everywhere, she was flying down the _only_ entrance to and from this area that wasn’t locked off. If anyone was there, she was fucked, because there would be nowhere to avoid them.

She ignored the ache in her knees, and kept on until she burst out onto the 1st floor of Special Projects, no one in sight. She crossed the wide open space of the area, dashing through rows and rows of heavily reinforced shelves, and was only a little bit worried about _how_ efficient Clint had been in clearing out her path out of her office.

 _101 seconds_ , she thought harshly, as she skidded to a stop in front of the the panel to the side of a door that looked like it belonged on the set of some shitty Sci-Fi channel special. She pulled the panel off, looking through the circuitry and got to work.

She had built some of the protocols that controlled security between sections during drills, and she knew exactly how to hack it. The problem was routing the hardwired security that Tony infused into his projects unconsciously, like breathing.

 _Fail-safe circuit, rerouted, independent Jarvis alarm button, rerouted. Shit, I have no idea what this triggers, but it looks nasty as fuck, disable,_ her internal monologue couldn’t be helped. Her thoughts splintered and reformed into streams, letting her focus on her internal timer, overriding the code and drawing from her new engineering knowledge from her almost complete Master’s ( _remind self to send in Master’s thesis by end of week)._

At 109.7 seconds, a slight, almost inaudible hiss of air came from the area of the all-metal door. She knew, that second, she had been successful. She mentally recorded everything she had done and a new stream of thought, now running in the background like a computer program, launched and started working on how she would reverse all she had done when she returned to this spot in exactly 57 minutes.

The 68th floor was the executive suites of Stark Industries, mostly Pepper and her most trusted. The specific timing of Darcy’s arrival onto the Stark Industries suites should have allowed for plenty of time for all of the VPs to make it to the saferoom, actually situated just off the entrance of the stairwell she was coming out of. Thankfully, Pepper was with Tony this morning, otherwise Darcy would have been worried about running into the stunning older woman. Since Pepper was superpowered and nigh on indestructible, it was entirely possible Pepper would have _taken her time to_ get to the saferoom.

Darcy had expected to have to use the night night gun in her hand, knock some people out so they wouldn’t see her make her escape.

Instead, it was almost eerie how silent all of the floors were. “ _Ingress attempt, code blue. Ingress attempt, code blue,_ ” chimed more strongly on these floors. She made it to the 65th floor conference room without any issues.

 _Almost too easy_ , she tried to avoid thinking, so as not to jinx herself.

When she entered the 65th floor, Clint was standing in the far right corner of the conference room, back in the groove where he would be out of sight of all the windows. He had a boyish, almost sweet, grin on his face, like a little boy bringing his mama a present for Mother's Day.

“Why are you smiling like that?” She asked, almost begging him to answer her, and a touch freaked out.

He glanced briefly at the clock just to the left of her, smiling. “This is actually going to work. I’m almost surprised, but …” he scratched the back of his neck in an _awwwww shucks_ gesture, “I am fucking awesome at my job.”

Her hand twitched on the night-night gun gripped firmly in her right hand. Clint flinched slightly, because of course he caught the motion.

“How the hell did you manage this?” She said, walking towards him and the giant fucking crossbow he had propped against his thigh.

He turned away from her briefly, giving her his back and a view of the dozens of arrows in the Stark-made quiver attached to it. He scanned briefly, a quick fluttering of eyes, the earpiece in his left ear beeping a steady rhythm.

He flagged her down with his left hand, arm and finger guard dark against his light tan. “I infiltrated a group calling themselves Centipede, another Nazi super-soldier type group of asswipes.” He picked the weapon up with his left hand. “They were going to attack the Tower sooner or later. They think they found Jarvis’ main control servers, but I actually directed them to the more critical audio and visual systems of the non-Avengers subsections, leaking faulty building schematics to corral them in the least populated and controllable areas.”

His dark brown hair, the kind of dark that you knew used to be blonde at an early age, showed hints of gold and hay when catching the sunlight. He sounded like a newscaster reporting the morning news.

“Someone,” he said drolly, as he opened the window of the building to a rush of cold cool air “hacked the local news network, and got a broadcast out this morning about an imminent attack. HR of most of the non-Stark companies gave their employees the morning off. A lot of the Stark employees straight up did not show up today, including that security guard you like. What’s her name, Charles?”

He lifted the giant crossbow up to his shoulder, “The rest of the Avengers were called out last last night. Somehow, some of Natasha’s contacts managed to incite a conflict between some large terrorist blocks in Bangladesh, one of which got their hands on some gamma wave generators and shoddy sci-fi rip off murder weapons. The radical extremists of the Rising Tide suddenly managed to find the IP address of some of Shield’s less secure digital archives, and their whole tech in this region should be tied up in fighting them off right now. Coulson is preoccupied with something in Japan that you honestly want to know _nothing_ about.”

With a shot of the custom arrow in the crossbow, a zip-line went shooting out into the distance, creating the perfect escape route onto the closest building next door. “Most of the attention should be focused on the other side of the building where one of the Centipede guys should be …” there was a dull-boom and a wave of honking echoing in and around the building, “entering the lobby to be met with lethal countermeasures attuned to their heat signatures. Their serum makes them almost as explody as Extremis.”

Another dull thump, not nearly as thunderous but something sizzled along the edges of Darcy’s senses, a ghost walking over her grave. The lights throughout the building flickered once before stabilizing, “And that should be them using the EMP bomb they had been building. But their time-line moved up unexpectedly,” he almost sounded like he was surprised and had nothing to do with that bit of happenstance. “It should only take out electronics in a half kilometer radius, meaning between here and your destination, while conveniently missing hospitals and other major utilities. But, of course, how could they know that almost all of the important parts of the Stark-vengers Tower are already insulated against such attacks.”

He handed her a hand-held attachment that he hooked on the the breach, passing her a pair of prototype Stark tactical glasses, like Google-Glasses but better. “Your route is programmed on this with a timer. I’m going to be taking the smaller quinjet out in approximately 40 minutes to ‘survey the landscape’” he added sarcastic air quotes, “after I kick their collective asses and save the day. I’ll smuggle you back inside, and no one will be the wiser.”

He returned to the boyish smile on his face as he calmly steered her to standing in front of the open window, prompting her to step up to be inside the windowsill. They stared at each other for a moment and her voice was soft with fondness when she said, “You are a menace.”

Clint reached up, briefly swiping away a stray bit of hair from Darcy’s face, before pulling her roughly into a one arm hug, making sure to support her weight so as not to accidentally push her out of the window. “You get back at the designated time, or you will find out exactly why Natasha won’t tell you about Kiev.”

The young woman opened her mouth to respond, but the rough, quick brush of his lips against her cheek shocked her into silence. Well … that, and the fact that he had just pushed her out the window with a cackle, as she zipped down the line, fighting the pounding pulse of her heartbeat and fear clawing against her throat.

The next 20 minutes were an absolutely blur for Darcy. She took approximately 1 minute to activate the temporary hair dye that Special Projects biology had created for her months ago, turning it to just a shade or two lighter than dirty blonde. The holo-emitter in the glasses were just strong enough to change the angle of her jaw and round out the straightness of her nose.

She grabbed the grappling hook that got her onto the building, unclipping it from the roof, forcing it to recoil to her. She moved to the other side of the building, the one her glasses pointed to with an electric blue arrow. When she approached the new edge of the building, it pointed down simply and sharply into an ally. She latched the hook onto the ledge once more, fisting the handle, and quickly repelled down the building between windows to avoid detection.

Once she made it to the ground floor, sweat starting to pool at the base of her neck, she let go, stuffed the hook into her backpack, and turned towards the street the glasses were directing her toward.

A small timer in the top left corner of her field of vision counted down the seconds slowly, perfectly in line with the numbers in her own head.

When she hit the main sidewalk a few seconds later, she joined the flow of people running away from the Avengers Tower. She ignored the sick feeling in her gut when, by the time she made it to the next block, a loud glass-shattering boom echoed behind her. She could feel the displaced air at her back, see the red and blue lights filling up the streets in front of her, the sounds of honking, panicked cars like a steady ache of arthritis in old bones.

Time blurred. There was almost no leeway in the timeline she'd been given. Five minutes until she got to a street with a non-descript bicycle hidden behind a dumpster. Dodging the traffic that swarmed to a standstill in some areas, flowing around her and in the same direction, a steady stream of traffic away from where she had been.

She biked faster than was wise, faster than she would normally dare. But the other bicycles, the handful that were there, did the same. Another dull explosion, despite being blocks and blocks and blocks away, cut the air. She could see the face of New York in the eyes of the pedestrians she almost bowled over when she had to swerve on some blocks when the directions on her glasses changed sharply ( _gotta update those, get tracking algorithms to compensate for sudden vector changes)_ and she was forced to take pedestrian sidewalks.

Their eyes were simultaneously bored and panicked, mostly the gun-punch reaction to the explosion, but a comfortable panic, like a well-worn shoe.

The time counted down, flashed red when she was behind her time goal, green when on target.

She arrived at a non-descript, run-down building, two seconds ahead of her target. She threw one leg over the side of the bike, wheels still moving, changed her balance to glide up to the entrance before she jumped off smoothly. She left the bike against the side of the building - knowing the neighborhood, it would be gone within minutes if she didn’t lock it to something. She didn’t bother, just opened the door and ran up the stairs.

When she was four floors up, her breath a harshly suppressed pant in her ribs, she paused. In a strong clear voice, as she landed on the 4th floor, she said, “Matthew Murdock, I know you can hear me and I need your help.”


	15. He Collects The Souls of Sinners and Condemns Them to Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title reference comes from [this link](http://66.media.tumblr.com/b30c3aceda9b6243edf4e6a62f02bb97/tumblr_inline_nlqionssG31t7fo1d_500.jpg) if you were curious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey folks, 
> 
> Here is the next chapter, folks. If you haven't yet, don't forget to check out my new fic [Asimov A'int Got Nothing On This](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7723309/chapters/17602609).
> 
> Many thanks, as always, to my wonderful Beta [AngelicSodaCan](http://angelicsodacan.tumblr.com/), the bestest beta anyone could ask for. Who named this chapters (and many chapters)
> 
> And hey ... thanks for reading. You're the best.

She passed by the opaque windows, the sign “Nelson & Murdock” cheaply but cleanly printed on the front door. She kept walking until she rounded the corner, completely out of sight of the entrance to the small law firm. The young woman turned her back to the wall, taking several deep breaths to calm herself before she started to speak.

“So, if you are alone, please come to the door and greet me. If you are not, can you get rid of them quickly? I need your help, but this has to be _absolutely private_. I’m not here to hurt anyone. If anything, I think we can both help each other.”

She quietly slid the gun into her thigh holster, almost invisible against the black of her black pants and black strap. The holographic clock in the corner of her vision ticked down strangely, the adrenaline winding down making the young woman feel like time was speeding up and slowing down in uneven spurts. All the effort, all the time, and all she had was a 7 minute window left to change the world.

Or, rather, change the Avengers’ world.

Almost 55 seconds tick by without anything notable occurring. She straight up does not have time for this shit.

“I know you have absolutely no reason to trust me, and I don’t know you well enough to know if threat or reward will get me through that door faster. But my window of opportunity is shrinking.” She shoved herself off from against the wall, quickly removing the backpack strapped tightly to her back. She didn’t open it, but she figured he would know that she was doing something.

“So, let's try both. If I’m talking with you alone in your office in the next 60 seconds, I have $10,000 in my backpack right now that is all yours and all the information the FBI has on organized crime in Hell’s Kitchen. If you we are not alone in your office in the next 60 seconds, I will pull out some of the more interesting gadgets in my repertoire. Non-lethal, of course.” She breathed deeply, forcing her relatively weak senses to sharpen.

The building was dead silent, she knew in large part because for the next week Nelson & Murdock were the only tenants in the office space. Therefore, it was easy to hear the echo of her own breaths in the cramped and run-down building. She heard the slight rumble of people moving far away, muffled and unclear. Exactly 35 seconds later, she heard what she thought was a muffled ‘Foggy’ and ‘coffee’.

At 55 seconds, she heard the door around the corner from her open, and a sweet but loud voice called out, “You are so getting the first round at Josie’s tonight. Just wait until I tell Karen.”

Another voice responded, perfectly controlled and not a hint of nerves she had somewhat expected to be there, “Yeah yeah yeah. Now, go get me an iced latte. No sweeteners!”

The thumps of footsteps on the stairs beat an uneven rhythm, ( _approximately 5’ 11”, 192 lbs,_ her brain supplied her unhelpfully), and a voice growing distant, “Thank god the new hipster place just opened up. Better than stomping off 8 blocks to Starbucks!” She wouldn’t admit it but a brief flash of irritation swept through her at him dissing Starbucks, despite her having worked there throughout college and knowing _exactly_ how awful it was.

“Would you like to come in now, Ms. ...?” His voice trailed off in a question. He had the kind of voice that appeared gentle at first sound, but when she turned the corner, with those dark red glasses staring somewhere far up and above her shoulder but ear turned towards her, she realized it was anything but.

“Well, hello handsome. Nice to see you in person and not all … you know?” She awkwardly gesticulated around her person, as if she was outlining her aura, saying, “With the whole black on black with a creeper mask get-up.”

If he used his eyes, she would swear he was rolling them at her. He stepped back from the door, gesticulating for her entrance with the same hand holding his cane. She tensed when he did not immediately move away from the door, forcing her to take measured but awkward steps to brush past him into the office.

The office itself was sparse. In one corner, there were boxes and boxes of unpacked, half-unpacked, and completely unpacked but with no clear organization. Ancient desktops lined the assistant’s desk that she saw there, making her wince at their ugliness.

Darcy deliberately ignored how his fists clenched tightly on the handles of his walking stick as she turned to face him, still standing a short distance from the front door. She jauntily jumped up, planting her butt on the desk behind her, crossed her legs, smiled bright and viciously, and gave him a small wave for his troubles. The beautiful young woman noted the careful cut of his suits, hiding lean strong muscle but well-tailored ( _self tailored?)_ , and kept her cool. She had punched Gods in the dick ( _Thor deserved it but it was an_ accident), she would not be easily intimidated by the straight line of his spine and his carefully controlled violence.

“I would like to remind you that you were the one that was in a rush to have this conversation,” Matthew Murdock had no idea what was going on and it showed in the curl of his jaw. His senses sharpened to a pinprick, he smelled sweat and last night’s Italian and something ginger, and a strong undercurrent that spoke of a beautiful woman in her prime. He could feel the outline of knives against wrists and guns and other things he could not identify.

“My name is Darcy Lewis, you might have heard of me. I’m a big deal with the Avengers and Stark Industries. Anyway,” she wiggled her body around, like she was impatient and fighting off a bought of ADHD-fueled inattention at the same time. The lawyer was reluctantly amused.

“I need your help with legal matters. Legal legal, not illegal legal, if that helps,” she said spit-fire rapid. “But like, as an actual lawyer who does law stuff.”

The raised eyebrow could cut glass. “I fail to see why you would bring yourself all the way from,” he unashamedly took a deep breath through his nostrils, smelling the faintest hint of a familiar food truck, “the other side of Midtown just to see me.”

“See, that’s the thing isn’t it.” Darcy gestured around herself wildly. “Why would I do this for some legal advice, right? The thing is, the kind of legal advice I need needs to be a secret until the very last possible moment.”

Darcy pinned him with her eyes and the spike in his pulse caused his neck to twitch subtly. She wasn’t sure if the threat of her gaze was making him afraid or … excited. She relaxed the line of her body, curving her spine subtly, and made a display of herself.

The raised eyebrow spoke annoyance, but Darcy knew the kind of effect she had on people. “You’re also forgetting that you have not given me any reason to trust the next words that come out of your mouth. Words that should be something like the truth.”

“I’m Tony Stark's daughter, and I need you to secure the inheritance Howard Stark left for me, and then have you lay the groundwork that will fund the operations and legal status of the Avengers as a completely independent initiative.” Darcy tilted her head, thinking of what else she had to say. “By June, ideally.”

The last time Matt Murdock was gobsmacked, it was because he had gotten hit in the face with a crowbar. He was so blindsided by the ask, he almost missed the young woman jumping

“What your asking for would take an army of lawyers, all with different specialties,” Matt couldn’t quite understand why he was making this point. He was confident in his legal abilities, as confident as he was in the way he wielded his own body. He could do it, he was sure.

And a favor and a fat check from a _Stark_ wouldn’t hurt.

Darcy shrugged, once again, nonchalantly. “I need this done quietly. Done so that even if I’m taken out the plans move forward, and by someone no one else would expect.”

Darcy twitched back, quick as lightning, narrowly missing a cane to the face. The rush of displaced air stung her eyelids.

“What kind of target would you be painting on my back if I did this for you?” Matt’s voice took on a growl, the voice he used in dark alleys and darker nights.

Darcy reacted, launching herself off the desk on her left leg, right leg launching at his midsection with a practiced motion. She had managed to legitimately hit Clint in the face just last week. She held nothing back.

Matt twitched to his left, pushing her leg as it swung past to throw her off balance. Darcy expected this and turned it into another roundhouse kick to the face that the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen only just managed to dodge, stumbling backwards.

“No more than what you already have on your back. I know how you’re after Fisk and the other big wigs in New York. I know you’ll help because it's the right thing to do.” Darcy shifted again, ready to launch at the man at a moment’s notice. She said it, because, “It was either you or an innocent. No other lawyers I can tap that would be able to keep themselves safe the way you can.”

Matt’s laugh was all masculine pleasure, his body relaxing

“God, you’re playing my guilt complex. How long have you been tracking me?” Matt asked, so sure that he had been staying out of the sight of CCTV. He could hear them from blocks away.

“A God landed on US soil, and I was one of the people left to clean up the mess,” Darcy shook her head, the weight of her braid heavy against her neck. “Months ago. You entered into enough alleys without exiting them anywhere nearby, it pinged my profile. I’ve been tracking such unusual activity in every major city for almost 2 years now. And trying to make sure innocent people don’t acquire any _unsavory attention_.” She waggled, “I’ve been thinking of calling myself Oracle. You know, really join the super-hero team bandwagon.”

He approached her, slowly, letting his cane propped against a wall. When he was within striking distance, he let his arms fall down, studying her once more with his senses.

“I’m trying to decide if you’re more likely to get _me_ killed with this, or yourself.”

“A little of Column A, a little of Column B,” she stated, clearly. “But I just set up like 17 shell companies, one of which bought out the landlord here. You’ll never get evicted, and after all of the legal shenanigans are done, I’ll ply you with money and less than legal information in abundance.”

 _It’s funny_ , Matt would think to himself, listening to the steady chorus of the young woman’s heartbeat and breathing, _that she says this all with a smile and light-humor, but is deadly serious about it all._

“Okay, one more question.” Matt asked, blank-faced. Darcy nodded, signaling her acceptance to another question. He let the silence linger for several long moments.

A smirk, a twitch at the corner of his lips, started to appear slowly on his face, “Would you like to grab a drink sometime?”

Darcy rolled her eyes, huffing, before she reached back to snag the backpack she had left on his desk. “I literally do not have time for you.” She pushed the bag roughly into his chest. He could practically feel the slight increase in body temperature and pheromones that indicated interest.

“That’s not a no,” the lawyer said, taking two quick steps forward, far enough away to feel body heat but not touching.

“You’re so pretty it’s stupid, but I’m trying to get into Captain America’s pants right now,” she delivered, bluntly.

“That’s okay. I’m open to a threesome,” his grin was all wolfish charm. Matt rarely had the chance to present himself as something other than a _blind man_ or a _masked vigilante_. It was refreshing to speak to someone who he didn’t have to hold back from (he didn’t think about Claire, the girl he just met, or Elektra, the girl he wished he never did).

“Devil may care, eh?” She said, sweetly. She stepped forward, breath dancing, mint and coffee and honeysuckle, no gap was left between them. She knocked him in the jaw with a right hook, launching him on his ass.

“I like you Matt Murdock,” she stated, turning to leave. “Burner phone, full details of what I need from you, and the money are in my bag. Text only.”

“Yes, Oracle Darcy Stark, ma’am!” he drawled mockingly from behind her on the floor. He didn’t need to turn his head to admire her leaving.

He smacked his hands against his face, “God, if you’re watching … I’m not even going to ask what I did to deserve this.”

Darcy’s laughter, tinged with a hint of hysteria and panic, echoed in the nearly empty building as she made her way out.


End file.
